No Hard Feelings, Right?

Seven centuries after getting kicked out, Dante Alighieri is being invited back to Florence.

The council approved a motion that called for the city's mayor to organize "a public rehabilitation" for Dante, who was sentenced in 1302 to exile from Florence under threat of death, ANSA reported Tuesday.

The motion, which passed by a 19-5 vote, calls for the mayor to head a public ceremony where the sentence would be revoked and the poet would be given the city's highest honor. The award would be accepted by one of Dante's descendants, the motion said. [Link]

For what it's worth, Dante himself seems quite content to stay where he is.

You Mean He Wasn't a Hunchbacked Woman?

More news on the search for Friedrich Schiller's earthly remains. Neither of the skulls thought to belong to the poet was his, and the two accompanying skeletons were found to "contain bones from at least six people."

Five members of the Schiller family were exhumed in the process to provide the DNA samples for comparison. They found no matching DNA among either of the poet's supposed bodies.

They determined that the skull found by von Froriep was far off the mark. Instead of Schiller, a large man, it actually belonged to a hunchbacked woman, who through analysis of the bones and historical records they later showed was a lady of the court whom Schiller was known to have disliked while alive. The jawbone belonged to another woman entirely.

The other skull was so similar to Schiller's death mask that it confounded even contemporary anthropologists, leading one to say that it belonged to Schiller's "Doppelgänger." The fact that this close match had seven strange teeth inserted post-mortem has led one of the experts who worked on the documentary to the conclusion that it was fixed to look like Schiller's skull and that the real one was stolen. [Link]

Lesbians Fighting Lesbians

Three residents of the Greek island of Lesbos want to reclaim the word "Lesbian" from a gay rights group.

One of the plaintiffs said Wednesday that the name of the association, Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece, "insults the identity" of the people of Lesbos, who are also known as Lesbians.

"My sister can't say she is a Lesbian," said Dimitris Lambrou. "Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos," he said.

Lesbos was home to the poet Sappho, whose works are popular with Lesbians lesbians.

Lambrou says Sappho was not gay. "But even if we assume she was, how can 250,000 people of Lesbian descent — including women — be considered homosexual?" [Link]

Hey Lydia, Guess Who Likes You!

Each year (usually around Valentine's Day) elementary-school students in Haverhill, Mass., pass on a message from a former pupil.

Yesterday morning the students descended on the historic Walnut Cemetery and remembered schoolboy emotions that ran through the heart of Haverhill's favorite son, John Greenleaf Whittier, when he was around their age.

It has become a tradition in Haverhill with local students gathering around the gravestone of Lydia Ayer to recite a poem by Whittier recalling his childhood sweetheart and a moment following a school spelling bee when she confesses, "I'm sorry that I spelt the word: I hate to go above you, because — the brown eyes lower fell — because, you see, I love you!" [Link]

One Skull Too Many

Anthropologists have exhumed three relatives of German playwright and poet Friedrich Schiller in hopes of positively identifying which of two skulls is his.

The mystery surrounding the skulls began in 1826, 21 years after Schiller died in Weimar, when the local mayor had 23 skulls retrieved from a mass grave in which the poet was buried. Many eminent people at that time were buried in mass graves.

The mayor identified the largest skull as Schiller's and it was brought to the home of his contemporary Goethe, who wrote a poem about it, according to German scholar Albrecht Schoene.

In 1911, another skull was disinterred from the mass grave which researchers claimed was the real one. [Link]

Genealogue Challenge #57

When T. S. Eliot's paternal grandfather died, what company handled the funeral services?

Poe Toaster a Hoax?

Each year on Edgar Allan Poe's birthday, a mysterious figure dressed in black lays roses and booze on his grave in Baltimore. Sam Porpora, 92, a former ad executive, is claiming that he created the legend.

Mr. Porpora's story begins in the late 1960s. He'd just been made historian of the church, built in 1852 at Fayette and Greene Streets. There were fewer than 60 congregants and Mr. Porpora, in his 60s, was one of the youngest. The overgrown cemetery was a favourite of drunken derelicts.

The site needed money and publicity, Mr. Porpora recalled. That, he said, is when the idea of the Poe toaster came to him. The story, as Mr. Porpora told it to a local reporter then, was that the tribute had been laid at the grave on Poe's Jan. 19 birthday every year since 1949. Three roses - one for Poe, one for his wife and one for his mother-in-law - and a bottle of cognac were placed there, because Poe loved the stuff even though he couldn't afford to drink it unless someone else was buying. [Link]

Critics say that Porpora may have popularized the legend, but that the mysterious stranger was showing up long before he became involved.

Sometimes History Is What You Can't Disprove

There are two opposing camps in Milton, Delaware: one that thinks the town was named for its long history as a mill town, and another that thinks it was named for poet John Milton. At a recent gathering held to mark the bicentennial of the naming, one of the factions heard some good news.

Near the end of the evening, Milton resident and poet Jamie Brown, owner of the John Milton & Co. bookstore and the founder of the annual John Milton Memorial Celebration of Poets and Poetry, said he had more proof - a first reference to Milton in the letter of a man who had emigrated from Delaware to Iowa around 1840, talking about how the town named Milton in Iowa was named after the town he had left that had been named for the poet.

Delaware Public Archives Director Russ McCabe had some words of wisdom for those who remained unconvinced.

“For now, if you want to believe the town is named for the mills, you can. If you want to believe it was named for the poet you can. Sometimes history isn’t so much what you can prove – it’s what you can’t disprove,” McCabe said. [Link]

The Bard Burns at Last

On Wednesday, the birth and marriage certificates of poet Robert Burns became the last available General Register Office for Scotland records to be digitized and placed online at ScotlandsPeople.

George Lyon, Deputy Public Services Minister, said the online publication of Burns's documents spearheaded a project which allowed people worldwide to capitalise on the growing interest in genealogical research and trace their Scots ancestry.

Mr Lyon said: "Scotland's old parochial records go back more than 450 years and include our national bard's birth and marriage certificates. These are the last set of registration documents to go online, marking the end of a £3m project to improve access to Scotland's records for genealogists worldwide." [Link]

Poe's Birthday Party Crashed

From Guardian Unlimited:

Poe graveside tribute remains a mystery

Associated Press
Thursday January 19, 2006

For the 57th year running, a mystery man today paid tribute to Edgar Allan Poe by placing roses and a bottle of cognac on the writer's grave to mark his birthday.

Some of the 25 spectators drawn to a tiny, locked graveyard in downtown Baltimore for the ceremony climbed over the walls of the site and were "running all over the place trying to find out how the guy gets in", according to Jeff Jerome, the most faithful viewer of the event.

Mr Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, said he had to chase people out of the graveyard, fearing they would interfere with the mystery visitor's ceremony.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

tags: genealogy, family history, family tree

Top Five Poems for Genealogists

5. Emily Dickinson, "I died for beauty. . ." It always makes me want to recommend techniques for cleaning tombstones.

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, — the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

4. Elizabeth Jennings, In Memory of Anyone Unknown to Me. A beautiful poem, but the author obviously lacks the curiosity to make a good genealogist.

At this particular time I have no one
Particular person to grieve for, though there must
Be many, many unknown ones going to dust
Slowly, not remembered for what they have done
Or left undone. For these, then, I will grieve
Being impartial, unable to deceive.

How they lived, or died, is quite unknown,
And, by that fact gives my grief purity—
An important person quite apart from me
Or one obscure who drifted down alone.
Both or all I remember, have a place.
For these I never encountered face to face.

Sentiment will creep in. I cast it out
Wishing to give these classical repose,
No epitaph, no poppy and no rose
From me, and certainly no wish to learn about
The way they lived or died. In earth or fire
They are gone. Simply because they were human, I admire.

3. Walt Whitman, With Antecedents, from Leaves of Grass. Not his best work, but certainly relevant.

[Excerpted]
WITH antecedents;
With my fathers and mothers, and the accumulations of past ages;
With all which, had it not been, I would not now be here, as I am:

                .       .       .

With the small shores we look back to from our own large and present shores;
With countless years drawing themselves onward, and arrived at these years;
You and Me arrived—America arrived, and making this year;
This year! sending itself ahead countless years to come.

2. Edgar Lee Masters, Cassius Hueffer, part of his Spoon River Anthology, a collection of free verse epitaphs contributed by the deceased. It was difficult to choose just one.

They have Chiseled on my stone the words:
'His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man.'
Those who knew me smile
As they read this empty rhetoric.
My epitaph should have been:
'Life was not gentle to him,
And the elements so mixed in him
That he made warfare on life,
In the which he was slain.'
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!

1. Robert Frost, The Generations of Men. He describes well a typical family reunion in New England. (I'll pass up the chance to include in this list his infamous epitaph, "Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.")

[Excerpted]
Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a by-road
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.