There's Only One Chicken in Alaska

Drawn from Donald Orth's 1967 Dictionary of Alaska Place Names:

Mishap Creek, aka Big Loss Creek, is Unimak Island stream named for a lighthouse keeper who stripped naked to cross the water, then tried to throw his clothes to the other side, only to watch helplessly as they landed downstream and disappeared.

There's Chicken, an old mining town established during the Klondike Gold Rush. A detailed history of the name is not in Orth's dictionary, but according to oft-told lore, miners wanted to call the community Ptarmigan after a bird common to the area, but no one knew how to spell it. So they settled on Chicken, since miners also called ptarmigans "tundra chickens."

Atlasta Creek was inspired by a remark uttered by the wife of the owner of a nearby roadhouse after the first building was completed: "At last a house."

Lost Temper Creek, an Arctic Slope stream, was named over a "camp incident." [Link]

[via Neatorama]

Bare Naked Genealogy

Leland Meitzler spotted this ad for the Australian version of Who Do You Think You Are? Whether it's safe for work may depend on your boss's eyesight.

He's Small, but He Has No Decency!

One of the most beloved landmarks in Brussels is the Manneken Pis—a 24-inch-tall bronze statue of a naked boy peeing. Whom the statue depicts depends on which story you believe.

The most common explanation (and one that is found on a wall plaque near the Pis) is a slightly twisted family story. A man lost his little son in the big city. The man searched high and low, but for two days, his son wasn’t to be found. Then, finally, he found his son — right as the boy was relieving himself on a street corner. So grateful was the man that he commissioned a statue of the boy just as he found him. [Link]

Another possible explanation identifies the boy as two-year-old Duke Godfrey II of Leuven, who was placed in a basket and hung from a tree during a battle in 1142, but managed to repel the enemy forces by tinkling on them.

Yet another version goes like this:

In the 14th century, Brussels was under siege by a foreign power. The city had held their ground for quite some time. The attackers had thought of a plan to place explosive charges at the city walls. A little boy named Juliaanske from Brussels happened to be spying on them as they were preparing. He urinated on the burning fuse and thus saved the city. [Link]

Check out his official website, or this panoramic view of the Manneken, but "Be careful! He's small … but he has no decency!"

The Naked Quaker

Diane Rapaport's second book, The Naked Quaker: True Crimes and Controversies from the Courts of Colonial New England, is due out in October. Based on her examination of court records, she has concluded that my ancestors probably did have sex.

“I think most of these stories could end up surprising to readers who imagine Puritan New England was some drab, dull place where people sat around in church and never had fun ... or sex,” she said. “I think people will be surprised by how feisty the early Colonists were.”

The book’s title story involves a 17th century Quaker woman from Hampton, Lydia Wardell, one of New England’s early Quakers, who showed her contempt for Puritan authorities by taking her clothes off during church services. [Link]

Rapaport's first book, by the way, was the indispensable New England Court Records: A Research Guide for Genealogists and Historians. Anyone whose New England ancestor left a will or dropped her drawers at church should own it.

Like Your Ancestors, Except Sexier

Golden Door—an award-winning film about sexy immigrants heading to Ellis Island—is now showing in selected cities.

On a perilous steamship journey from his Sicilian village, the widower Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato) encounters a ravishing, mystery-shrouded Englishwoman, Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg, The Science of Sleep) — as the Old World literally collides into the New with seductive results.

Amid a harrowing crossing, an unexpected love story unfolds all the way to the halls of Ellis Island, where both Salvatore and Lucy will stop at nothing to make it through the GOLDEN DOOR to the America of their imaginations.

According to IMDb, there is "brief graphic nudity," so I may have to see it twice.

Family History Laid Bare

What little Mary Carey knows of her paternal grandmother, Mary Tsun née Rudenoff, comes from a dossier prepared prior to her deportation from Canada in 1933.

What I do know, having read that file over and over, is that she had "brown hair and blue eyes." I would have thought brown eyes from her photo. There are also things about her that I wish I did not know. A doctor's report in her file describes her naked body – the flesh and blood of my ancestor – in detailed minutiae. The first time I read it, I felt the shame Mary must have felt at the time. I wanted to reach through time and cover her up with a warm blanket of Siberian sable. [Link]

Man Enjoys Cemetery Visit Too Much

The head of a cleaning company in Scotland was nabbed for romping naked in a graveyard.

Charles Rose, 35, was captured on CCTV running around the cemetery in Edinburgh, and leaping over gravestones.

Sheriff Elizabeth Jarvie decided not to place him on the sexual offenders' register, while admitting that his behaviour was 'certainly unusual.' He was instead placed on probation for six months.

A second charge of rubbing his gentials on a gravestone was dropped. [Link]

Whatever "gentials" are, I hope they were confiscated to prevent a recurrence of this aberrant behavior.

The Bride Wore ... Nothing

I've just run into an instance of a "shift marriage" in the published vital records of Newbury, Mass. Stephen Mitchel married Mrs. Katherine Brown on Jan. 4, 1774. The record of intentions (2:66) indicates that "the said Stephen takes said Katherine naked and so will not be obliged to pay any of her former husband's debts."

Aside from giving the pastor a thrill, a shift marriage (or smock marriage) served as a do-it-yourself legal proceeding. The idea was that, if the bride came to the marriage with no possessions (she was sometimes allowed to wear a shift, or chemise), she wouldn't bring with her the debts of the deadbeat she'd previously wed. Sometimes the unclothed bride was allowed to participate by sticking her hand through a "widow's hole" in a door.

When Major Moses JOY married Widow Hannah WARD of Newfame, Vermont, in 1789, she was stark naked. She was in a closet, her hand extended through a hole cut in the door. Then she put on a fine set of clothes and emerged from her closet in style, to the general admiration of the assembled. [Link]

Other times, the ceremony was held on a public road for all to witness.

Thomas Calverwell was joyned in marriage to Abigail Calverwell his wife the 22 February, 1719. He took her in marriage after she had gone four times across the highway in only her shift and hairlace and no other clothing. [Link]

A notice from The Fredonian of May 15, 1810, demonstrates that the British were not above causing their brides public embarrassment.

In England, Mr. Joshua Cossack, to Miss Mary Lofts; to secure her swain against the gripe of her unfeeling creditors, the bride crossed the highway, in a state of perfect nudity previous to going into church.

Would this debt-forgiveness plan have stood up in court? John Buckman wasn't eager to test it, according to a 1659 deposition in Essex County, Mass.

Jno. Blany [...] deposed that about Michaelmas time he heard Joseph Armytage demand of John Buckman five pounds which Wm. Butler owed him; he said he would pay it, although he took his wife bare, without anything. [Link]

As someone who hates sitting through weddings, I think this is a custom that deserves to be revived—so long as the widows are under thirty and go to the gym once in a while.

It's More Than I Can Bare

It's always interesting to look through a website's statistics to see how people came to find your site. While doing this, I discovered that The Genealogue ranks very well in Google for the words nude genealogist. In fact, at the moment this is the number one destination on the Web for nude genealogy enthusiasts.

What disturbs me most about this is that there are people in the world who are searching for nude genealogists. These sickos are in desperate need of a more sensible fetish—perhaps something involving bondage and butterscotch pudding.

Genealogy in the buff is certainly not something that I condone. Delicate body parts can easily get caught in spinning microfilm reels; and most cemetery associations frown on the nude rubbing of tombstones.

Luckily, those with prurient interests will find the second Google search result more to their liking: a 2002 Eastman article on a shocking picture found among the microfilmed deeds of Smith County, Tennessee. And if you really can't do without a nude genealogist, I suspect this is one.

What a Beautiful Chest—I Mean Crest

Stephanie Ogilvie at the Roanoke Times has some skeletons in her closet: the kind of skeletons that make genealogy worthwhile.

Our ancestry is Scottish, and the Ogilvie clan crest is — and I'm not making this up — a naked, buxom woman chained to an iron cage.

Classy.

Then there's the transvestite tightrope walker.

Apparently my grandmother was the youngest child of an American-style Von Trapp family (a la "Sound of Music"), and they traveled the South during the Great Depression, singing and performing circus tricks. Her father just happened to dress as a woman during his daring act.

Well, this explains a lot. [Link]