A little pointless rambling

Well! I look at my previous post and realize that it has been almost five months since I last blogged. Life interfered in the form of work, remodeling, and vacation, and my literary energies have been directed elsewhere. I have spent a share of my time on Ancestry as well as combing through old newspapers and Luxembourgish vital records, as usual, but with perhaps less focus in my research. Yet it is high time that I shared something.

I only wish I knew what to share.

I have a smattering of transcribed newspaper articles relating to Rockaway Beach, Oregon, in chronological order. However, as I look through them, I think that some of them may require more explanation than I am prepared to give at this time. But, even without explanation, this one is an entertaining read:

(30 July 1911, Oregonian p. 10)

Woman Pilots Automobile.

FOREST GROVE, Or., July 29.--(Special.)--The first woman to drive an automobile to the coast and return by way of Sheridan is Mrs. John A. Thornburgh, of this city, wife of the Mayor and president of the Forest Grove National Bank. Mr. and Mrs. Thornburgh, accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. E. F. Burlingham, left this city at 6 o’clock in the morning, and arrived at Garibaldi by 1 o’clock in the afternoon, a distance of over a hundred miles. The party visited Bayocean, Rockaway Beach, Netarts, and Tillamook and found the roads in good condition.

Too bad it’s no longer considered newsworthy for a woman to drive to the beach, or I would practically be a celebrity. Plus I like the verb “pilot” applied to an automobile.

I have also amassed a pile of papers covered with notes on the EVANS family. If you read my post on The Capricious Credibility of Oral History, the EVANS family is the family of my supposedly “Indian” (meaning Native American, not from India) great-great grandmother Angeline (EVANS) WADE.

In that pile of papers are census abstracts, marriages, to-do lists, and a hand-drawn timeline so marked up that I can scarcely make sense of my own markings anymore. I would very much like to write it all up in a blog post, but first I will have to make sense of it. That will take a lot more time than I have to devote tonight.

I also have a few juicy plots that I am dying to share, but they fall within the purview of the Brosius family saga I have been gradually relating, and I need to wait until the proper time to recount them.

So there we are. Unless I simply post some transcribed and translated Luxembourgish records—which I have no intention of doing—I am at a loss. So if you read this post, I sincerely hope you are related to Mrs. John A. Thornburgh. Otherwise I have just wasted your good time.