BackTrack's Back!

I am very pleased to see that Sharon is back blogging at BackTrack. If enough of us subscribe to her feed, perhaps we can keep her from straying again.

A Much Married Man

Wilanne Stangel spotted an Ancestry.com message board posting about her dad, William J. Stangel.

"It was about a 3-year-old listing. It was a man who was looking for information about his father, William James Stangel."

Her response to Rolf "K.C." Stangel led to the realization that William Stangel had fathered them by different mothers. In the more than four years since the discovery, the Stangels have located two more half-siblings they hadn't known about and found records of at least 10 marriages involving their father, who died in 1974.

"We're at the point now where we're continually looking," said Wilanne Stangel, who is 48 years old and works as a librarian at Villa Madonna Academy. [Link]

[Thanks, J. Hansen!]

He'll Never Succeed at Succeeding

Robin Bryan is a third cousin of the Queen, and 496th in the line of succession to the British throne.

When last tracked down he was living in a ‘seedy’ part of Toronto, Canada, where he was working as a municipal gardener.

Bryan’s mother sold nylons in a New York department store and advertised bubble gum, and the only legacy of his royal bloodline was a few pieces of crested china, which had once belonged to his great-grandmother — Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Beatrice.

Every time he looks in the mirror, though, he says he sees a Hanoverian. As for potential heirs, he is the father of three illegitimate children by three different women. [Link]

More people whose faces you'll never see printed on currency here.

You've Got to Hide Your Anachronisms Away

The York (Pa.) Sunday News had an interesting article on the cost of being a Civil War re-enactor.

It costs $1,500 to $2,300 to authentically fight, dress and camp as if it's July 1863 and you're an infantryman in the Federal or Confederate army.

If you wear glasses, as [Keith] MacGregor does, another expense are antique spectacles with prescription lenses.

"The idea behind re-enacting is you want to keep all modern anachronisms away from the public view," he said.

"You're putting forth an impression of 1860s America, and you want to remain there as much as possible. You don't want to be sitting there with a plastic bottle of soda." [Link]

[Photo credit: Gettysburg by Joe Shlabotnik]

Supply Your Own Scalps

As Janice mentioned a couple of years ago, the New Hampshire Historical Society is selling bobbleheaded dolls of famous figures in Granite State history.

The latest additions to the New Hampshire Historical Society's "bobblehead" series are Chief Passaconaway, a respected leader of the Pennacook tribe, and Hannah Duston, who famously killed and scalped her Native American captors during a daring escape.

The Hannah Duston figure is modeled after a statue of her in Haverhill, Mass., not the one in Boscawen. In New Hampshire's version, "In one hand, she's holding her hatchet, but in the other she's holding the scalps," [Society executive director Bill] Veillette said.

After some consideration, he decided "it would be kind of icky to buy something with somebody holding bleeding scalps." [Link]

Buried at the Ball Park

Ken McCracken has determined that Capt. William McCracken, Jr., was the last American soldier to die in the Revolutionary War, and that he is buried somewhere in Cincinnati's Great American Ball Park. The grave is in one of two locations:

-- Deep under the far southwest corner of the ballpark footprint, along Joe Nuxhall Way, south of the team's Hall of Fame. That spot would be a fenced-in, AstroTurf-covered rectangle next to the Rose Garden. The garden marks the spot where Pete Rose's record-breaking hit No. 4,192 landed in 1985.

-- Across Joe Nuxhall Way from the fenced-in space. Teeming with earth-moving equipment, that spot is the future home of a parking garage serving the proposed Cincinnati Riverfront Park and The Banks project.

"That's as close as I can narrow it down after well over a decade of genealogical research trying to see if I'm related to this man. I feel very confident I've got my facts straight," said Ken McCracken, an amateur historian. [Link]

[Thanks, J. Hansen!]

[Photo credit: nice day by Robert Meeks]

A President's Residence

Kathryn Larcher sent me a link to this article about the discovery of George Washington's boyhood home.

Artifacts from the Washington period were crucial. These included wine bottles, knives and forks, pieces of small figurines, wig curlers, bone toothbrush handles and a clay pipe with a Masonic crest that just possibly was George’s. Fragments of an elaborate Wedgwood tea set, presumably belonging to Mary Washington, showed that the family’s fortunes had revived after the hardships immediately following the father’s death. [Link]

In related news, archaeologists in New Haven, Connecticut, have discovered the actual silver spoon George W. Bush had in his mouth when born.

[Thanks, Kathryn!]