A Halloween Intervention

It started with a query on the neighborhood Facebook page from one of our new neighbors - how much candy should we get for Halloween?  The responses were quick and depressing.  Not much.  Hardly any trick-or-treaters.  Some years, we don't even see most of the kids who live on our street, much less anyone else.

(Just now I started to write that "I can understand how some adults may not enjoy Halloween," but that's not actually true-- I don't really understand it.  Halloween involves outdoors and getting out in your neighborhood in the evening and non-threatening interactions with children you don't know, as well as a chance to decorate your house and yard and wear costumes, so I can't understand why anyone wouldn't enjoy it, but maybe some people don't -- dentists, for example.)

The best place I ever lived as far as observing Halloween was Baltimore.  In the late 1980s, I lived in the Hampden neighborhood in Baltimore, and at least at that time, they really knew how to celebrate Halloween.  I lived in a house on Roland Avenue that year, and -- like our new neighbors on Wessyngton -- didn't quite know what to expect in terms of numbers of trick or treaters I should be prepared for.  But it seemed like almost all the houses had Halloween decorations up, so I thought it might be a Big Deal, and got what I thought would be a sufficient amount of candy.  Then I reconsidered and got some more, just to be safe.  On Halloween night, the visitors to my door were pretty much constant throughout the evening.  I have no idea how many trick or treaters came around that night, but it was a lot.  I remember I was concerned I was going to run out of candy. I didn't, but it was close.

If decorating is the measure, Halloween is more of an event in our neighborhood every year.  More and more houses in Morningside have elaborate decorations of the type that used to be reserved for Christmas, with lights and inflatables and life-sized plastic skeletons and tombstones in the front yard.  Here are a few more or less random ones from North Morningside.

Now, based on the Baltimore experience, I would expect that this increasing interest in decorating would translate into hoards of trick or treaters, but it just hasn't happened, or at least not on Wessyngton. 

There were more houses with Halloween decorations on Wessyngton, this year, and some of us put our houses on the Treat Map that was on Nextdoor, but it's not like it was candy corn from Highland to Cumberland.  

What to do? I thought maybe some Halloween lights on our street signs would help, with the thought that trick or treaters have to make a decision to turn onto Wessyngton from Highland or Cumberland, and the houses with lights and decorations up aren't necessarily so visible from those corners. So on Halloween afternoon I went to the Halloween store at the development at Piedmont and Sidney Marcus, to get some battery-powered lights to put up on our street sign at Wessyngton and Cumberland.  

Everyone else in the Atlanta metro area appeared to also have last minute Halloween shopping needs as well.  Even before I got into the store, there was a hint that it was going to be crowded, as everyone visible in the parking lot was converging on this one store.  When I arrived, the line for check out extended to the door and I decided I didn't want to buy anything there that badly, so went to the level below to Target where I found some battery-powered Halloween lights.  There were plenty of last minute shoppers there too, but it was a bigger store and they weren't so overwhelmed.  Once I got home, Iain and I put the lights up on the street sign and we hoped for the best.

We got some early trick or treaters -- mostly little kids who live on our street -- and they continued to trickle by throughout the evening.  Probably there were 20 or 25 who came by, more than I remember ever having.  Was it more houses with decorations, or the Treat Map, or the lights on the street sign?  I'm not sure, but probably all of the above.  And once it got dark, Tom built a fire in our new fire ring out on the drive way, and several of our neighbors stopped by. All in all, it was a very nice Halloween.

The next day, I went back to Target and got more lights (now 50% off), including another set of battery-powered lights for the street sign at the other end of Wessyngton.  

Next year, we'll do even better. I'll be sure to have plenty of firewood, as well.

Six Degrees of Baltimore

I was in Switzerland last week, and one night over dinner we talked about family history.  The discussion got me thinking again about Tom's family. I've tried a variety of strategies to supplement what he remembers about his grandparents, to try to track them down and the people before them. For the longest time, I couldn't find the Bewersdorfs, because we weren't spelling the name close to correctly; I finally found them in the same household in the 1900 Census with Tom's grandfather, who had married into the family. I've tried tracing back from cousins and more distant relatives, with the thought that what I can't find directly someone else may have already found.



Last week - having drawn a blank on the Schmitts once again - I started looking again at cousins. Tom's grandmother Johanna Bewersdorf had a cousin, Otto Doroff, who lived in Baltimore. (When Johanna's mother Wilhelmina died, the obituary notice in the Chicago newspapers included a sentence, "Baltimore papers please copy." That puzzled me when I first saw it; I later figured out that Wilhelmina's brothers Herman and Frederick both had lived in Baltimore.) Otto was Herman's youngest child, and in the 1920 Census, he was in Baltimore, living with his wife Edna and his in-laws, Franklin and Celestia Gladfelter. The Gladfelter name seemed familiar -- Gladfelters had emigrated around the same time as the Reins -- so I thought if I could find Franklin's ancestors I might be able to find some connection to the Gladfelters in York County, Pennsylvania, and a connection to my family tree. It took a couple of days before I had time to work on it, but on Saturday I found records for Franklin's father Cornelius who had been Iowa during the 1880s before returning to York County. Cornelius Glatfelter's great-grandfather was Casper Glattfelder, and Casper's niece Elizabeth Glattfelder married Jacob Rein, my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, who had emigrated to the colonies in 1738. Tom's grandmother's cousin had married a woman whose great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was Felix Glattfelder, my 7th great-grandfather.

I tried to explain this by email to Tom by email, but failed miserably. When I got home I asked if he'd understood what I send him. No, he said. So I told him, leaving our the "first cousin 2 times removed part," and all he said was, "How did you figure that out?" I told him I just remembered the Gladfelter/Glattfelder name, and had thought if I could go back far enough I might be able to find a connection.

Edna and Otto married right after World War I; Edna's and my common ancestor was born in Switzerland in 1669. I told my astonished children that if we go back far enough, we're all related. And of course, this is pretty far back. I don't even know what else to say about this. How can my husband's family (they were midwesterners, from the Chicago area and from Iowa) and my family (in the southeast from since before the American Revolution) have gotten entangled in Baltimore?

There are a lot of things in life that are due to chance. Tom and I were introduced by my third Russian teacher; I met her through an ad she had placed in Creative Loafing, after my second Russian teacher left to go to the (then) Soviet Union for the summer. Of course, if I hadn't started Russian while I was at Johns Hopkins, when I was living in Baltimore ...

Never mind.