Friday Funny: A quiet, grave time

I was recently looking through my small collection of antique post cards, and came across this gem. It is a comic post card depicting a man smoking a pipe and pouring himself a drink while sitting atop the headstone which presumably belonged to his wife. The stone reads:

JANE ANN

DEAR WIFE

OF

JOHN HENPECK

and the caption reads “A quiet, grave time, at last!” At the top, someone has penned in the initials J.W.

On the reverse is a one cent stamp, with a post mark dated 1 Aug 1908 at 9 a.m. in Vancouver, Washington. The card is addressed to Mr. P. Gusted (or perhaps it is Lusted?), Portland, Oregon, and appears to have the memo that it is in care of “W. V. tel. Co.” The correspondence reads,

Hello Nephew,

Will be over Sun. morning if everything is Ho-K.

and it is signed either “your Uncy. Geo.” or “your Uncy. Leo.”

A quick Ancestry search through Portland city directories revealed no P. Gusted or P. Lusted, although there were others of both those surnames. I was reluctant to attempt more in-depth research, so I can currently shed no light on the recipient of this card. The sender is even more mysterious, as he signed only his first name. As for the initials “J. W.” on the front of the card—well, I have no idea what those mean.

Roots Quest 2017

This is an experiment; for the first time I am attempting to compose and post from my new-to-me smartphone. 

Yesterday I attended the Roots Quest 2017 conference in Forest Grove, Oregon. Of course there were a few nuggets in the classes, but what I really want to share is a display/scavenger hunt they had set up in the cafeteria. They had taken documents  (from the various presenters' research) and blown them up to about double ledger size. The scavenger hunt part involved inspecting the documents to find the answers to a list of questions, such as "What is the date of William Schnell's marriage?" or "What kind of person was Amanda Tice?" The answer to the latter, incidentally, was "industrous," according to a pauper register.

I thought this display would be a lovely idea for a family reunion.

I realize this post is slightly inane and poorly written, however, as I said before, it is serving mainly as an experiment to test out this app on my phone.

 

Conclusion: I doubt if I will be using the app to compose posts in the future. I had to use my laptop to fix some problems with this post, and I was dissatisfied with the editing abilities of the app. Besides, I prefer to compose first in a word processor. But I'm glad I tried the experiment.