...is there no good place for an E in your last name, Fred?

I just had a rather distressing lunchtime shopping experience. Less so for me than for others, but my heart was still racing: I was at Target (a two-level one) and walked past the escalators, looking at a dress, suddenly heard SCREAMIING. SCREAMING. This woman was going down the escalator with her kid (looked to be 3 or 4) and he'd gotten his foot stuck in the side of the escalator, and she was shrieking for someone to turn off the escalator as they continued to go down. Eventually she popped his foot out. She kept screaming, though. I couldn't tell how he was--she was still screaming, but the other people around seemed fairly calm (telling her to calm down) so I'm guessing he didn't look too bad (clearly no bleeding, but it could've been sprained or broken)--he was crying, but not bloodcurdlingly so.

Had me all shook up for a few minutes, and I'm not even a mother.

Oh, meara, that's awful.

...is there no good place for an E in your last name, Fred?

There's already one in the first syllable. But if the person I found actually was my grandfather, there used to be another "e" between the final "c" and "k." But somewhere between WWII and the 1930 census, he seems to have dropped the second "e." Which also means he dropped a whole syllable.

And egad about the escalator. At least there wasn't any miserable ending.

Oh yeah. It took me a moment to parse, but that's quite a different name. Huh.

When I was looking at the 1920 census, I discovered that my father used to have an entirely different first name. Ah, the things you discover when there's no one left to ask.

Quickly popping in to tell Cindy that the JrNYLC is legit. My cousin took part in the NYLC for high school students 3 years ago and had an awesome, awesome time. It completely changed how she viewed herself and her educational opportunities. I can't recommend it enough.

That, too, connie. I also found out that my paternal grandmother was about 11 months older than I'd always thought. And her father (who, in fairness, was dead by the time I was born) had a first name other than what I'd thought it was. (I'd thought it was Hugh but it was actually William. Which isn't the best first name to match up with Williams, but I didn't have any say in the matter.)

The 1920 census lists my great-great grandparents as divorced from each other. The 1930 lists them both as living in the same town and not far from my great-grandfather (their son), but he's listed as a widower and she as a widow. No interesting name changes, though, unless you count things like my Uncle Svetik going by Steve with people who aren't us. Which is weird, if you are me and didn't realize he did that, but understandable.

Congratulations on the opportunity for the sprog, Cindy, sounds neat.

One of my aunts died a week or so ago. I was feeling self conscious about having no idea who she was, and even when my mother pointed out that I knew her daughter, at least...well, it wasn't until my father, her brother, said "Oh, well, I don't think you've ever met."

You have a sibling who lives in the same city as you, and I've met and extensively socialised with all your other siblings but her?

That's why I stopped doing the family tree--there's no drama there, or anything. Just some sister he mostly forgot he had.

Families are WEIRD.

I remember attending my maternal grandparents' wedding. They'd divorced when their kids were grade-school age but remarried during the late '60s. I'm not sure why they remarried -- they didn't live together afterward or anything like that.