I know, movies usually name a sequel "Son of..." but in this case I want to talk some about the women.
I had just concluded that in the genealogies of Jesus given in Matthew 1 and Luke 3, we have to concede there are gaps, right from the start. We have very little extra input from these family trees. They are a bare line of paternal names that should have dotted lines showing descent in many cases, as there might have been additional generations in between the generations listed.
Plus they leave out the women-folk. Luke is particularly strict about this, he won't even mention Mary, and she's the one he's tracing the line of!
Matthew actually mentions a few women--Mary, the woman pregnant out-of-wedlock by the Holy Spirit; Bathsheba, the woman whom King David had an affair with and then killed her husband in order to cover it up; Ruth, the woman of despised Moab, an enemy of Israel, who bathed and perfumed herself and went to sleep at Boaz' feet in order to induce him to offer marriage; Rahab, a harlot from Jericho, who hid the Israelite spies when they came to do reconnaissance before attacking the city, and who later married one of them; Tamar, a widow whose nearest kinsman scorned to raise up an heir to her dead husband with her, so she disguised herself as a harlot and slept with her father-in-law in order to beget the heir. (So, what's your point, Matthew?) I think the only reason he refrained from dredging up Eve, who tempted her husband to eat of the apple and sin against God, was because he only went back as far as Abraham.
My study Bible notes that where the women are mentioned--against all tradition--in this family tree, it is to make a point. Apparently, Matthew wants to point out that Jesus was the Savior not only of the Hebrews--but also of women; of the gentiles; of the sinners; of the weak, the poor and the victims. Well, you have to admit, those are the groups who need a savior. If you were a strong, righteous man of God's Chosen People, why would you really need rescue? No feedback on the "captive Israel" history (and the diaspora), please. I've read it, and I am not denying that the Jews as a people needed a rescuer and redeemer. Just acknowledging that Matthew was writing to ALL people, and reassuring the kind of people who probably most feel the need for a Knight in Shining Armor.
In any case, the trees do not fork, because there is next to no information on the wives' families. Though again, it is possible that some of the reasons for the differences is that "son of" might be used as "son-in-law of." I find it a little hard to swallow, though, because they just didn't find the women to be that important.
How do we fill in the gaps? One answer is: Genesis. Another is: I and II Samuel, I and II Kings and I and II Chronicles. There are others, such as Exodus, Numbers, Ruth... I can tell that this is going to be a very in-depth study, and a lesson for me in comparative documentation. Even the books of the prophets talk about who was king of Israel and/or of Judah at the time of the various prophets, which is relevant since Jesus is descended from those kings.
One thing I've found so far is that in II Chronicles, there are delightful little throw-away lines like this: "Rehoboam rested with his fathers and was buried in the City of David. And Abijah his son succeeded him as king... and he reigned in Jerusalem three years. His mother's name was Maacah, a daughter of Uriel of Gibeah." Several of the kings had their mothers' names listed in such a fashion.
But unfortunately for the purposes of this blog, I chose a poor example of a great discovery of a mother's name because this specific example requires more research. I can find some conflicting info right in the previous page. If I hadn't found it, I would have said, "so now we know that Rehoboam had a wife or concubine named Maacah, and they had a son Abijah. Also we know that Maacah's father was Uriel." But the following tidbit precedes the other: "Rehoboam...married Maacah daughter of Absalom [a son of David], who bore him Abijah, Attai, Ziza and Shelomith. Rehoboam loved Maacah daughter of Absalom more than any of his other wives and concubines." So is there a conflict? Was Maacah really the daughter of Uriel, or was she the daughter of Absalom? Or was she a daughter of Uriel who was a son (or grandson) of Absalom? Or is there some confusion between Absalom's MOTHER Maacah (a wife or concubine of David, I forget which, he had so many) and Absalom's DAUGHTER Maacah?
Stay tuned for the answers to that one, if I find any. I know there are additional stories about Absalom in the Bible. I don't remember much except he killed his brother.
I think that even with the entry of some of the wives' names, we are still going to be focused on a mostly paternal-line tree. I've only found one or two of the women whose father's name is listed.
But in the meantime, I have no doubt that I will find some wonderful answers and some terrible puzzles, some ridiculous items in the book of Numbers (see the U.S. Census from any given decade if you think there won't be hilarious statements just because the census takers had bad handwriting and spelling, no matter how divinely inspired or truthful the original information), and all kinds of crazy questions and relationships. And definitely some brick walls, as I cannot read Chaldean, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek or Hebrew, so I can't do the primary research in ancient extra-Biblical sources. But I expect that what I find in the Bible will be enough for now. I'll have to ask God about the rest, when he eventually calls me home. I hope I am required to call upon all my patience in waiting for that, though.
Meanwhile, it should be a fun genealogical ride if anyone wants to come along!
Monday, January 3, 2011
Yet More Biblical Genealogy
Back to the genealogies of Jesus found in Matthew 1 and Luke 3...
So if we backtrack and use the assumption that one tree is that of Joseph and the other is that of Mary, when we get back to their most recent joint ancestor, they should be the same from that point on back to Abraham. Zerubbabel. ("What?!" you ask. "Is that even a word?") Their most recent joint ancestor is Zerubbabel. From Zerubbabel on to Joseph, the lines are quite different, but before that, they ought to be exactly the same back to David and to Abraham, which they are not. And Zerubbabel himself is part of a terrible documentation tangle, which I'm going to skip for just a moment, as I haven't answered it to my entire satisfaction yet anyway. But the fact remains, the lines are NOT the same back from Zerubbabel back to Abraham. Why?
Well, part of the reason stems from language usage. Just because someone uses the word "father" or "son" doesn't make the relationship an actual physical father-son relationship. As we noted above, sometimes it meant "son-in-law" or "adopted heir."
But also "father" or "son" can be more figurative. In American history, the Sons of Liberty and the Daughters of the American Revolution are not, of course, children of some goddess named Freedom or the physical offspring of a war. They were/are organizations of individuals all devoted to the same ideals and goals. And George Washington, the Father of our Country, did not actually physically father any human being, though he was a beloved step-father to the children of his bride, the widowed Martha Dandridge Custis. He was merely the founder and establisher of our nation and governmental system (along with the other Founding Fathers; ooh! more fathers!).
We genealogists and historians might call our ancestors "forefathers" and less frequently or more poetically as "fathers." I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that in Hebrew, the concept translates to just "fathers". So "father" means ancestor of whatever degree, and "son" means descendant. (I love it in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia where the animal characters refer to the human boys as "sons of Adam" and to the girls as "daughters of Eve.")
And in various societies and even in English we say that one can be a son of a tribe or clan or royal house. As part of the ancient Hebrews, the tribe of Judah, and the House of David, this would definitely be such a case for Jesus and his ancestors.
So, given the basic historical dates involved, when Matthew uses the following phrase to introduce his genealogy, we know that there is some kind of figurative speaking going on: "A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." Matthew wanted to point out first that Jesus was the Messiah (thus the title Christ) who was descended from royalty (King David) and from the patriarch and founder of the Jewish people (Abraham).
And then both Matthew and Luke proceed to list the generations from Abraham to David and even from David down until the exile in Babylon by judiciously skipping generations that didn't matter to their worldview. (Luke actually takes the list all the way from Adam to Jesus, though as far as I can tell, he didn't skip too many between Adam and Abraham.) And so there are gaps in both genealogies right from the start.
We have very little extra input from these family trees. They are a bare line of paternal names that should have dotted lines showing descent, as there might have been additional generations in between.
How do we fix this? Stay tuned.
So if we backtrack and use the assumption that one tree is that of Joseph and the other is that of Mary, when we get back to their most recent joint ancestor, they should be the same from that point on back to Abraham. Zerubbabel. ("What?!" you ask. "Is that even a word?") Their most recent joint ancestor is Zerubbabel. From Zerubbabel on to Joseph, the lines are quite different, but before that, they ought to be exactly the same back to David and to Abraham, which they are not. And Zerubbabel himself is part of a terrible documentation tangle, which I'm going to skip for just a moment, as I haven't answered it to my entire satisfaction yet anyway. But the fact remains, the lines are NOT the same back from Zerubbabel back to Abraham. Why?
Well, part of the reason stems from language usage. Just because someone uses the word "father" or "son" doesn't make the relationship an actual physical father-son relationship. As we noted above, sometimes it meant "son-in-law" or "adopted heir."
But also "father" or "son" can be more figurative. In American history, the Sons of Liberty and the Daughters of the American Revolution are not, of course, children of some goddess named Freedom or the physical offspring of a war. They were/are organizations of individuals all devoted to the same ideals and goals. And George Washington, the Father of our Country, did not actually physically father any human being, though he was a beloved step-father to the children of his bride, the widowed Martha Dandridge Custis. He was merely the founder and establisher of our nation and governmental system (along with the other Founding Fathers; ooh! more fathers!).
We genealogists and historians might call our ancestors "forefathers" and less frequently or more poetically as "fathers." I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that in Hebrew, the concept translates to just "fathers". So "father" means ancestor of whatever degree, and "son" means descendant. (I love it in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia where the animal characters refer to the human boys as "sons of Adam" and to the girls as "daughters of Eve.")
And in various societies and even in English we say that one can be a son of a tribe or clan or royal house. As part of the ancient Hebrews, the tribe of Judah, and the House of David, this would definitely be such a case for Jesus and his ancestors.
So, given the basic historical dates involved, when Matthew uses the following phrase to introduce his genealogy, we know that there is some kind of figurative speaking going on: "A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." Matthew wanted to point out first that Jesus was the Messiah (thus the title Christ) who was descended from royalty (King David) and from the patriarch and founder of the Jewish people (Abraham).
And then both Matthew and Luke proceed to list the generations from Abraham to David and even from David down until the exile in Babylon by judiciously skipping generations that didn't matter to their worldview. (Luke actually takes the list all the way from Adam to Jesus, though as far as I can tell, he didn't skip too many between Adam and Abraham.) And so there are gaps in both genealogies right from the start.
We have very little extra input from these family trees. They are a bare line of paternal names that should have dotted lines showing descent, as there might have been additional generations in between.
How do we fix this? Stay tuned.
More Biblical Genealogy
Here's where we left Jesus' genealogies from the Gospels: So is Matthew's take on it better, or is Luke's? Or is there any way to reconcile the two?
Here's one way: Some scholars say that Matthew's genealogy is Jesus' descent from Joseph, that is, his legal claim to be a descendant of King David, and Luke's genealogy is Jesus' descent from Mary, that is, his physical human descent from King David (both Joseph and Mary were of the house of David). So when Luke says, "Jesus was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli," he was just using the then-typical convention of leaving the women out of things. He was really saying"Jesus was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the 'son' (son-in-law) of Heli," that is, "Jesus was the son of Mary, the daughter of Heli."
Now, just to confuse the issue, some scholars say that, no, Matthew's genealogy was the full legal line of descent from David to Jesus through Joseph, while Luke's genealogy was the physical line of descent from David to Jesus, still through Joseph. What that means is that the Mosaic/Levitic law has lots of ways to be a legal heir ("son"). For example, it says that if a man dies without an heir, his brother (or closest male relative) must marry the widow and raise up a son who is the legal heir of the dead man; also that a couple beyond childbearing without a male heir were permitted to adopt an adult male servant to be their heir, and so forth. That would seem to indicate that the differences between the genealogies in the two gospels are entirely from these kind of situations. So for example, Matthew says Joseph son of Jacob son of Matthan, while Luke says Joseph son of Heli son of Matthat (spelling or transcription error accounting for the difference between Matthan and Matthat, presumably)--so the idea is that Matthan/t had two sons, Jacob the elder and Heli the younger, that Jacob died without sons and Heli married the widow to raise up an heir for Jacob, Joseph being the heir in question. In other words, legally Joseph was the son of Jacob while the physical DNA came from Heli.
I find that I strongly disagree with this second stance--that the two trees are a legal versus physical line of descent, both down to Joseph. Scholars need to check the internal consistency of their logic... Logically, the two trees ought to be fairly similar, with one or two names different here or there, if they differ only in being legal versus physical, since the legal inheritance must come from a close male relative of the deceased. Which means the physical father must be a brother or cousin of the legal father (or even, in a worst case scenario, the father of the legal father--I found at least one case like that in the Scriptures, in this lineage in fact), which means the legal father and the physical one would share a parent or grandparent or other direct male ancestor. And those two trees are just NOT that similar.
Here's my main objection to the legal vs. physical argument, based on an inconsistency in the logic. In Matthew, you find that the descent from Abraham to King David contains the following sequence: "Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David." And Luke has the same thing (note, Matthew was counting down the generations and Luke counting up, but they add up to the same names): "David, the son of Jesse, the son of Obed, the son of Boaz, the son of Salmon"--but here's the kicker: they should NOT say the same thing if one is a legal line and the other a physical line.
The book of Ruth is quite clear: Ruth was the wife of Mahlon, son of Elimelech and Naomi; Elimelech dies, then Mahlon and Mahlon's brother Kilion die without heirs. Naomi goes back to Israel (the family was living in Moab at the time), taking Ruth, who refused to go home to her parents. When they arrive in Israel, Naomi is quite poor with no husband or sons or grandsons to care for her. But there is one wealthy close kinsman, Boaz (the son of Salmon and the harlot Rahab), who steps in to marry the widow Ruth (though she was a despised Moabite) and raise up an heir to her deceased husband. Obed is in fact the child of this marriage and is heir to Mahlon. So Matthew, if he were doing the full legal descent down to Christ, should have said, "Elimelech, the father of Mahlon, the father of Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David" while Luke would still be permitted to follow the DNA from David up through Jesse, Obed, Boaz, and Salmon. [Presumably, Elimelech and Salmon were brothers or close cousins and within a generation or two, the lineage would merge into the joint ancestors.] So the claim that the differences between the trees are legal vs. physical lines of inheritance just doesn't hold up.
(The other example I found was this: Judah, son of Israel, had twin sons by Tamar, his son Er's widow. There's a whole big story; look it up on Bible Gateway if you've forgotten it. Anyway, Matthew and Luke both list Perez as a son of Judah. But to be a strict interpretation of legal lineage, Matthew should have said Perez son of Er son of Judah. Luke was okay with the direct DNA on that one. I'm sure there are further examples, I just haven't located them yet.)
Oho! I thought when I noticed this. This is going to be more involved than I thought! And maybe more interesting and more fruitful, both in learning about genealogy and learning about the Bible. It will certainly take more than a day or two of quiet time to sort out. I probably should break here and do a separate blog for the next stuff, so look for the follow-on in my next post.
Here's one way: Some scholars say that Matthew's genealogy is Jesus' descent from Joseph, that is, his legal claim to be a descendant of King David, and Luke's genealogy is Jesus' descent from Mary, that is, his physical human descent from King David (both Joseph and Mary were of the house of David). So when Luke says, "Jesus was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli," he was just using the then-typical convention of leaving the women out of things. He was really saying"Jesus was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the 'son' (son-in-law) of Heli," that is, "Jesus was the son of Mary, the daughter of Heli."
Now, just to confuse the issue, some scholars say that, no, Matthew's genealogy was the full legal line of descent from David to Jesus through Joseph, while Luke's genealogy was the physical line of descent from David to Jesus, still through Joseph. What that means is that the Mosaic/Levitic law has lots of ways to be a legal heir ("son"). For example, it says that if a man dies without an heir, his brother (or closest male relative) must marry the widow and raise up a son who is the legal heir of the dead man; also that a couple beyond childbearing without a male heir were permitted to adopt an adult male servant to be their heir, and so forth. That would seem to indicate that the differences between the genealogies in the two gospels are entirely from these kind of situations. So for example, Matthew says Joseph son of Jacob son of Matthan, while Luke says Joseph son of Heli son of Matthat (spelling or transcription error accounting for the difference between Matthan and Matthat, presumably)--so the idea is that Matthan/t had two sons, Jacob the elder and Heli the younger, that Jacob died without sons and Heli married the widow to raise up an heir for Jacob, Joseph being the heir in question. In other words, legally Joseph was the son of Jacob while the physical DNA came from Heli.
I find that I strongly disagree with this second stance--that the two trees are a legal versus physical line of descent, both down to Joseph. Scholars need to check the internal consistency of their logic... Logically, the two trees ought to be fairly similar, with one or two names different here or there, if they differ only in being legal versus physical, since the legal inheritance must come from a close male relative of the deceased. Which means the physical father must be a brother or cousin of the legal father (or even, in a worst case scenario, the father of the legal father--I found at least one case like that in the Scriptures, in this lineage in fact), which means the legal father and the physical one would share a parent or grandparent or other direct male ancestor. And those two trees are just NOT that similar.
Here's my main objection to the legal vs. physical argument, based on an inconsistency in the logic. In Matthew, you find that the descent from Abraham to King David contains the following sequence: "Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab, Boaz the father of Obed, whose mother was Ruth, Obed the father of Jesse, and Jesse the father of King David." And Luke has the same thing (note, Matthew was counting down the generations and Luke counting up, but they add up to the same names): "David, the son of Jesse, the son of Obed, the son of Boaz, the son of Salmon"--but here's the kicker: they should NOT say the same thing if one is a legal line and the other a physical line.
The book of Ruth is quite clear: Ruth was the wife of Mahlon, son of Elimelech and Naomi; Elimelech dies, then Mahlon and Mahlon's brother Kilion die without heirs. Naomi goes back to Israel (the family was living in Moab at the time), taking Ruth, who refused to go home to her parents. When they arrive in Israel, Naomi is quite poor with no husband or sons or grandsons to care for her. But there is one wealthy close kinsman, Boaz (the son of Salmon and the harlot Rahab), who steps in to marry the widow Ruth (though she was a despised Moabite) and raise up an heir to her deceased husband. Obed is in fact the child of this marriage and is heir to Mahlon. So Matthew, if he were doing the full legal descent down to Christ, should have said, "Elimelech, the father of Mahlon, the father of Obed, the father of Jesse, the father of David" while Luke would still be permitted to follow the DNA from David up through Jesse, Obed, Boaz, and Salmon. [Presumably, Elimelech and Salmon were brothers or close cousins and within a generation or two, the lineage would merge into the joint ancestors.] So the claim that the differences between the trees are legal vs. physical lines of inheritance just doesn't hold up.
(The other example I found was this: Judah, son of Israel, had twin sons by Tamar, his son Er's widow. There's a whole big story; look it up on Bible Gateway if you've forgotten it. Anyway, Matthew and Luke both list Perez as a son of Judah. But to be a strict interpretation of legal lineage, Matthew should have said Perez son of Er son of Judah. Luke was okay with the direct DNA on that one. I'm sure there are further examples, I just haven't located them yet.)
Oho! I thought when I noticed this. This is going to be more involved than I thought! And maybe more interesting and more fruitful, both in learning about genealogy and learning about the Bible. It will certainly take more than a day or two of quiet time to sort out. I probably should break here and do a separate blog for the next stuff, so look for the follow-on in my next post.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
An Exercise in Genealogical Documentation
I know it has been a while since I last posted.
The last year has flown by. I'm not quite sure why time speeds up as we age, but I'm pretty sure the past year has taken around 45 minutes, and the previous one only lasted a day or two. I guess I was most focused on my father's health--he's still paralyzed, quadriplegic, and the doctor says that he's reached about the limits of his recovery; my father says "Don't you believe it!"--and on our move, my daughter's high school career, my limited genealogy efforts, our volunteering work and our church. But mostly the move.
We left our "starter home," a townhouse that was to be our 5-year home. You know, we really had plans for our financial security when we got married. We rented an apartment for the first two years, then bought our 5-year townhouse. My husband and I were both working, we were putting away good savings and paying extra on the principal on the mortgage loan each month. And then life happened during those 5 years...mostly the birth of our child and our decision that it was more important to have a stay-at-home mommy there for her than to have lots of disposable income (or savings, or, it turns out, a bigger home). Well, 17 years after we bought that 5-year townhouse, we are finally in a single family home with a yard. We were mostly spurred on to the move because our daughter was going into high school and the old townhouse was in the district for a ... let's tactfully call it "less than stellar" high school. She's in a great school now (same county, different school), and we're pleased with the house, the neighbors, the traffic, the area. We could really only afford this house because of the timing in the economy. Sometime I should blog more about how we got the house, because folks who are trying to buy a short-sale property might find it encouraging.
But of course, we've been a tiny bit house-poor for a while, and I've been doing a lot of furnishing and decorating from yard sales and Craigslist. Both are a marvelous source of bargains in quite nice furniture and housewares and decor, so long as you are VERY choosy and willing to haggle a little bit. I'm pleased with the results so far, though I'm a long way from done. We have also been doing most of the handy-man and fixer-upper work ourselves--painting, installing new hardware and fixtures, refinishing, and so forth. It takes time.
In any case, I was pointing out that I hadn't blogged for a while, and I am sorry. Given the stress and upheaval of the last couple years, I'm just glad I can start back up again. I recently also started back up with a Bible study group, which I had also let slide. I was feeling guilty that I wasn't spending as much time in the Word as I ought to, even alone. Then at the beginning of this Christmas season, I was looking at some ideas for having a Jesse tree for Advent, and a thought occurred to me.
What if I were to do up Jesus' family tree? I should be doing more Bible study and I really love doing genealogy; why not mix the two? I could certainly sit down for two or three mornings and use my genealogy software to enter the names as I pulled them from the Bible. Shouldn't be too hard, right? Shouldn't take much time or effort? Well, I am finding that it is a serious exercise in genealogical documentation.
For example, there are two straightforward genealogies of Christ found in the gospels: Matthew 1 and Luke 3. Yet they are significantly different in some aspects and quite similar in others. They both name Joseph as the (apparent) father of Jesus. But they start with the conflicting information that Joseph was the son of Jacob--no, the son of Heli. And of course, Jesus wasn't the son of Joseph, anyway, right? He was conceived by the Holy Spirit. So it is hopeless from the get-go, isn't it? I thought about concluding that we don't know (and can't find out) about Mary's genealogy, and as for God's--I seem to remember some "Beginning and the End" "Alpha and Omega" "uncreated and unbegotten" thing...
And if we do decide we are going with the two accounts we have and only doing Joseph's tree, do we just assume that one is right and the other wrong? After all, Matthew was a disciple and he knew Jesus personally. So maybe he had a chat with Mary and wrote down everything she could remember about the family tree. There was a serious oral tradition among the Hebrew people, maybe she did have a bunch memorized. On the other hand, Matthew was a tax collector, not a brain surgeon. And Dr. Luke (who was writing around the same time as Matthew or very shortly later), while perhaps not a brain surgeon, was still a physician, well educated, and though he wasn't one of the 12 disciples, was at least a companion of the apostle Paul and would have had contact with the various still-living disciples and followers and family of Jesus. As a physician and historian, he had to know how to research. He probably had access to all kinds of reference material. Certainly a big chunk of the line he was researching was part of a King's lineage so would have been written about, both formally and informally. So is Matthew's take on it better, or is Luke's? Or is there any way to reconcile the two?
I'm no Biblical scholar or pastor, I don't have a background in this stuff. But I am a genealogist, so hopefully I can examine comparative genealogical documentation and get it sorted out, at least to my own satisfaction. I'll plan to use lots of help from my various study Bibles, the BibleGateway.com site which does have the full text of the various translations, the sermon notes I've made over the years, some insights from Christian writers such as (but not limited to, depending on who actually wrote what on this topic!) C.S. Lewis, Peter Marshall, Lee Strobel (the author of "The Case for..." series), and Randy Alcorn. Though primarily the info will come straight from the Bible.
I will follow up on Jesus' lineage in my next several posts.
Meanwhile for the actual dates of Jesus' life, I want to make a recommendation. Please, please, if you haven't yet seen the movie "The Star of Bethlehem," make every effort to watch it. (Including the bonus footage, which contains a real show-stopper about the date of Jesus' death.) Rick Larson has spent many years studying this topic and has, I think, made a terrific case for the dates of Christ's birth and death. I think every Christian should at least look at the movie--click on the movie name to get to the ordering website. For more background, click here. Possibly not everyone will agree with his conclusions about the dates, but Larson makes some great points. And his work definitely gets my "Wow!!!" vote.
Certainly acquiring the dates of Jesus' life by the movement of the stars and planets--astronomy, not crazy astrology stuff--is no worse (and actually is more accurate, since the stars are the ultimate perpetual calendar!) than double checking a perpetual calendar to come up with an ancestor's date of death from an undated obit cut out from a paper.
I mean, face it, haven't we genealogists all looked at something like this on a newspaper scrap: "Mr. Smith passed away last Tuesday the 18th of April after a brief stay in the hospital," and then gone to our favorite perpetual calendar website to check on which years between Mr. Smith's last appearance in the census of 1910 and his widow's remarriage in 1924 that the 18th of April fell on a Tuesday?
So whether Jesus' actual date of birth was December 25th or not, Merry Christmas. And Happy New Year!
The last year has flown by. I'm not quite sure why time speeds up as we age, but I'm pretty sure the past year has taken around 45 minutes, and the previous one only lasted a day or two. I guess I was most focused on my father's health--he's still paralyzed, quadriplegic, and the doctor says that he's reached about the limits of his recovery; my father says "Don't you believe it!"--and on our move, my daughter's high school career, my limited genealogy efforts, our volunteering work and our church. But mostly the move.
We left our "starter home," a townhouse that was to be our 5-year home. You know, we really had plans for our financial security when we got married. We rented an apartment for the first two years, then bought our 5-year townhouse. My husband and I were both working, we were putting away good savings and paying extra on the principal on the mortgage loan each month. And then life happened during those 5 years...mostly the birth of our child and our decision that it was more important to have a stay-at-home mommy there for her than to have lots of disposable income (or savings, or, it turns out, a bigger home). Well, 17 years after we bought that 5-year townhouse, we are finally in a single family home with a yard. We were mostly spurred on to the move because our daughter was going into high school and the old townhouse was in the district for a ... let's tactfully call it "less than stellar" high school. She's in a great school now (same county, different school), and we're pleased with the house, the neighbors, the traffic, the area. We could really only afford this house because of the timing in the economy. Sometime I should blog more about how we got the house, because folks who are trying to buy a short-sale property might find it encouraging.
But of course, we've been a tiny bit house-poor for a while, and I've been doing a lot of furnishing and decorating from yard sales and Craigslist. Both are a marvelous source of bargains in quite nice furniture and housewares and decor, so long as you are VERY choosy and willing to haggle a little bit. I'm pleased with the results so far, though I'm a long way from done. We have also been doing most of the handy-man and fixer-upper work ourselves--painting, installing new hardware and fixtures, refinishing, and so forth. It takes time.
In any case, I was pointing out that I hadn't blogged for a while, and I am sorry. Given the stress and upheaval of the last couple years, I'm just glad I can start back up again. I recently also started back up with a Bible study group, which I had also let slide. I was feeling guilty that I wasn't spending as much time in the Word as I ought to, even alone. Then at the beginning of this Christmas season, I was looking at some ideas for having a Jesse tree for Advent, and a thought occurred to me.
What if I were to do up Jesus' family tree? I should be doing more Bible study and I really love doing genealogy; why not mix the two? I could certainly sit down for two or three mornings and use my genealogy software to enter the names as I pulled them from the Bible. Shouldn't be too hard, right? Shouldn't take much time or effort? Well, I am finding that it is a serious exercise in genealogical documentation.
For example, there are two straightforward genealogies of Christ found in the gospels: Matthew 1 and Luke 3. Yet they are significantly different in some aspects and quite similar in others. They both name Joseph as the (apparent) father of Jesus. But they start with the conflicting information that Joseph was the son of Jacob--no, the son of Heli. And of course, Jesus wasn't the son of Joseph, anyway, right? He was conceived by the Holy Spirit. So it is hopeless from the get-go, isn't it? I thought about concluding that we don't know (and can't find out) about Mary's genealogy, and as for God's--I seem to remember some "Beginning and the End" "Alpha and Omega" "uncreated and unbegotten" thing...
And if we do decide we are going with the two accounts we have and only doing Joseph's tree, do we just assume that one is right and the other wrong? After all, Matthew was a disciple and he knew Jesus personally. So maybe he had a chat with Mary and wrote down everything she could remember about the family tree. There was a serious oral tradition among the Hebrew people, maybe she did have a bunch memorized. On the other hand, Matthew was a tax collector, not a brain surgeon. And Dr. Luke (who was writing around the same time as Matthew or very shortly later), while perhaps not a brain surgeon, was still a physician, well educated, and though he wasn't one of the 12 disciples, was at least a companion of the apostle Paul and would have had contact with the various still-living disciples and followers and family of Jesus. As a physician and historian, he had to know how to research. He probably had access to all kinds of reference material. Certainly a big chunk of the line he was researching was part of a King's lineage so would have been written about, both formally and informally. So is Matthew's take on it better, or is Luke's? Or is there any way to reconcile the two?
I'm no Biblical scholar or pastor, I don't have a background in this stuff. But I am a genealogist, so hopefully I can examine comparative genealogical documentation and get it sorted out, at least to my own satisfaction. I'll plan to use lots of help from my various study Bibles, the BibleGateway.com site which does have the full text of the various translations, the sermon notes I've made over the years, some insights from Christian writers such as (but not limited to, depending on who actually wrote what on this topic!) C.S. Lewis, Peter Marshall, Lee Strobel (the author of "The Case for..." series), and Randy Alcorn. Though primarily the info will come straight from the Bible.
I will follow up on Jesus' lineage in my next several posts.
Meanwhile for the actual dates of Jesus' life, I want to make a recommendation. Please, please, if you haven't yet seen the movie "The Star of Bethlehem," make every effort to watch it. (Including the bonus footage, which contains a real show-stopper about the date of Jesus' death.) Rick Larson has spent many years studying this topic and has, I think, made a terrific case for the dates of Christ's birth and death. I think every Christian should at least look at the movie--click on the movie name to get to the ordering website. For more background, click here. Possibly not everyone will agree with his conclusions about the dates, but Larson makes some great points. And his work definitely gets my "Wow!!!" vote.
Certainly acquiring the dates of Jesus' life by the movement of the stars and planets--astronomy, not crazy astrology stuff--is no worse (and actually is more accurate, since the stars are the ultimate perpetual calendar!) than double checking a perpetual calendar to come up with an ancestor's date of death from an undated obit cut out from a paper.
I mean, face it, haven't we genealogists all looked at something like this on a newspaper scrap: "Mr. Smith passed away last Tuesday the 18th of April after a brief stay in the hospital," and then gone to our favorite perpetual calendar website to check on which years between Mr. Smith's last appearance in the census of 1910 and his widow's remarriage in 1924 that the 18th of April fell on a Tuesday?
So whether Jesus' actual date of birth was December 25th or not, Merry Christmas. And Happy New Year!
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Thanks for the Memories
One of the things I'm thankful for, since Thanksgiving is the time for counting our blessings, is that there is such a thing as photographs, and that my ancestors indulged their desire to record their appearance for posterity. Some of them may have regarded it as little short of sinful (judging from the expressions on a few faces), but they did it anyway. As an only child, the oldest grandchild on both sides, I seem to have become the repository of many of the ancestors' photos and tintypes and portraits in oil, pastels, watercolor or pencil. And thank the Lord for my grandmothers, the story-tellers, who made sure to label who these strange people were!
Don't get me wrong, I certainly understand where the Amish are coming from when they avoid photographs--they want to avoid making graven images. Even their dolls don't have faces. Though I think if they ever had the experience of looking at a passport photo of themselves, they would see that the rest of us certainly have no intention of worshiping the images...
And I even kind of understand where various primitive societies think that photographs steal a piece of your soul. It's just that it is such a minute piece, such a tiny instant in time, such a brief flicker of life, that we can go back to again and again to remember the pleasure of that moment, the joy we experienced and the fun we had, and to regain just an echo of the joy in the memory.
Hmmm. Maybe the soul-stealing theory explains why some of those Hollywood types seem to have no sense of morals at all--they spend all their time on camera and having their pictures taken, and it has stolen their souls away completely! Paparazzi as vampires? It might explain it. Okay, shame on me--enough snarky comments for the moment.
Anyway, one of my friends at church was telling me on Sunday about her mother coming to live with her and her family. Her father had passed on some time ago, and now the old house was empty. So my friend and her husband went in to start clearing things out, and discovered boxes of old photos in the basement. Some were moldy and many needed restoration. Some were labeled on the back with the names and some were not. There were snapshots, portrait card photos, tintypes. I guess it may not look like it at the moment, but what a treasure trove! She plans on having her mom and aunt go through the photos with her to tell her who the unlabeled ones are. And she wants to somehow preserve them. So this is partly for her, and partly for anyone who has discovered the mixed blessing that a damp box of old photos can bring.
If you have old photos you want to preserve, you can have them professionally restored and preserved, copied, filed in acid free envelopes, and stored away from light in fire-proof vaults. And that ain't cheap! Naturally, you only want to do that with the real jewels!
But as an intermediate step, particularly for the ones in good shape that you merely want to limit their exposure to sunlight, you can scan them in to your computer. Then you can get your own acid-free storage envelopes and boxes, and put the originals away in a bank lock-box or somewhere fire-proof.
Some guidelines for not damaging the originals: Use a modern cool-light flatbed scanner--alternatively, a really high resolution digital camera in good indirect light works--no scanners where you poke the photo in one end and it drags the photo over the sensor then spits it out; don't force a bent (or curled or folded) photo flat; don't take framed photos out from behind their glass as they sometimes crumble; don't jar the old cabinet photos because the silvering may not be sticking very tightly to the glass it is printed on and may flake or powder away; don't work around food or liquid--which shouldn't be around your computer or scanner anyway, but in these days of laptops and portable scanners sometimes happens; never use a permanent marker or a ballpoint to write names on the back as it will bleed or poke through the materials--use pencil or a very fine felt tip pen, lightly. Scan at very high resolution (you can store the humongous images on CD) and high color depth, even the monochrome ones. Save the image as scanned, with a very descriptive name, even if it is just "LargeFlakyTintypeFromDadsCellar_UnknownFemale3.jpg".
Make a copy of the image file to work with in PhotoShop or PaintShopPro, and try things like heightening the contrast, lightening or darkening the whole image, changing the sepia tones to gray-scale (you would be amazed at the detail that sometimes comes out of this simple step--blank faces that suddenly have features, for example), increasing the saturation of the color in old snapshots, removal of red tint (sometimes the old polaroids go weirdly red over the years), removal of the virtual mildew spots (use a clone brush to grab the color from a nearby pixel), cropping the picture and enlarging the cropped area to get a clear view of the people, and so forth. There are loads of things to try, and as long as you have saved the original image, you can go back and make multiple copies to try different techniques.
Once you have one that you love, you can print on a high resolution color printer, on a photo printer, or even send the file online to your nearest Walmart one-hour photo center for prints.
If you do the third option, remember that the minimum-wage clerks sometimes have difficulty grasping the notion (or sometimes understanding your English) that a studio photo of your granddad at age two, taken back in 1907, is no longer under copyright. In this event, you will have to talk to a manager, in order to rescue your prints that the clerk is holding hostage with the intent of doing their duty to enforce copyright law.
You will end up saying to the clerk, "What do you mean, I can't have my photo? Look, that baby is my granddad! Look at the old clothes! Look at the shoes! No one makes anything like that today! The thing was taken over a century ago! The studio has been out of business since 1952! And the photography studio was owned by my grandmother's uncle, anyway, which makes it family property! It's my granddad as an infant! And I have white hair myself, you know this can't be a recent photo! How hard can this be to understand?! Oh, get the manager." You can then say the same thing to the manager, without exclamation points, and you won't have any problem. Just make sure you ask for the manager before you start tearing your hair out. There's no sense in messing up your own appearance for a photo's appearance, and you are much more credible to the manager if you don't look like a madwoman.
Of course, do check the applicable copyright laws before trying to make a print of a studio photograph, just so you know where you stand. You can't make a copy of your kid's graduation portrait from last year, or even your wedding portrait from 20 years ago unless you bought the copyright from the photographer, and most of us didn't because it was expensive, or unless you have a written permission from the photographer or studio.
One warning: this process is painstaking and intriguing, may cause eyestrain and backache, and can be habit-forming. Side effects include learning new things about image processing, computers, art, fashion through the years, and the role of genetics in family resemblance.
And as my grandma's dear friend and neighbor used to say (about 40 years ago, about doing petit-point embroidery), "It's teedjus work, very teedjus." For those of you who need a translator, as I did back in my childhood days, it's "tedious." For those of you who are still in the dark, as I was back in my childhood days, look it up in the dictionary. But while it is teedjus, it is nonetheless extremely fulfilling to see the image come clear right in front of your eyes. Which is doubtless why Grandma's friend did petit-point in the first place, as well.
I had the great pleasure, several years ago, to do a photo-restoration favor for my grandmother (not the funny little cuddly Dutchy one, but the stern upright one with the twinkle in her eye). She had a letter from her old high school that the old school building had burnt down along with all the photos of the graduating classes. Well, Grandmother was the last living member of the Class of 1928, and she had her old yearbook, and she wanted to do something for the school in time for the annual alumni banquet. (Incidentally, Grandmother's aunt and uncle really did own the studio where the portraits were taken. There was even an ad for their studio in the back of the yearbook.) So I scanned in the portraits of each of the members of her class (all eight of them), cropped them into ovals and arranged them into two rows on one background, labeled each oval with the student's name, added the name of the school and the class at the bottom, printed it out as a high resolution 8"x10" photo (how big does it really need to be when there are only 8 people?), and framed it. We sent it along with a nice donation letter that mentioned the predictions made concerning the members of the Class of 1928 in the Class Prophecy in the yearbook, along with the actual histories of the class members.
I loved the prophecies. I remember my grandmother was going to be a "bachelor-girl" who would start as a secretary and become a successful business woman who would remain single all her life. Her sister was going to become a nurse, marry a specific fellow in the class, raise a large family and live for many years, welcoming my grandmother into her home for flying visits between business trips. Another girl in the class was going to marry my grandmother's cousin (a member of the previous year's class) after she had been a flight stewardess or something like that. Well, my grandmother obviously didn't stay a "bachelor-girl"; she married my granddad, and I for one am grateful for that--I owe my existence to the fact! She was the one who raised a large family and became a nurse--she had 4 babies of her own, and helped deliver many more as a labor-and-delivery nurse--and lived for many years, to age 96, in fact. Grandmother's sister, I think, took a secretarial course, as she hated being around sick people; she did marry a fellow from the class, but not the one predicted, and she died in childbirth several years later. The other girl in the class did marry Grandmother's cousin (though she never became a stewardess and I'm not even sure she ever flew in an airplane!), but of course, I think the Class Prophet (my Grandmother) already knew that particular romance was in the air. Clearly the Class Prophet had certain ambitions, and either wasn't much of a prophet, or only "saw through a mirror, dimly."
And so this Thanksgiving (and always), I am thankful for memories, for photographs, for modern technology, for "unanswered" prayers, for friends, for hobbies, for genealogy.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly understand where the Amish are coming from when they avoid photographs--they want to avoid making graven images. Even their dolls don't have faces. Though I think if they ever had the experience of looking at a passport photo of themselves, they would see that the rest of us certainly have no intention of worshiping the images...
And I even kind of understand where various primitive societies think that photographs steal a piece of your soul. It's just that it is such a minute piece, such a tiny instant in time, such a brief flicker of life, that we can go back to again and again to remember the pleasure of that moment, the joy we experienced and the fun we had, and to regain just an echo of the joy in the memory.
Hmmm. Maybe the soul-stealing theory explains why some of those Hollywood types seem to have no sense of morals at all--they spend all their time on camera and having their pictures taken, and it has stolen their souls away completely! Paparazzi as vampires? It might explain it. Okay, shame on me--enough snarky comments for the moment.
Anyway, one of my friends at church was telling me on Sunday about her mother coming to live with her and her family. Her father had passed on some time ago, and now the old house was empty. So my friend and her husband went in to start clearing things out, and discovered boxes of old photos in the basement. Some were moldy and many needed restoration. Some were labeled on the back with the names and some were not. There were snapshots, portrait card photos, tintypes. I guess it may not look like it at the moment, but what a treasure trove! She plans on having her mom and aunt go through the photos with her to tell her who the unlabeled ones are. And she wants to somehow preserve them. So this is partly for her, and partly for anyone who has discovered the mixed blessing that a damp box of old photos can bring.
If you have old photos you want to preserve, you can have them professionally restored and preserved, copied, filed in acid free envelopes, and stored away from light in fire-proof vaults. And that ain't cheap! Naturally, you only want to do that with the real jewels!
But as an intermediate step, particularly for the ones in good shape that you merely want to limit their exposure to sunlight, you can scan them in to your computer. Then you can get your own acid-free storage envelopes and boxes, and put the originals away in a bank lock-box or somewhere fire-proof.
Some guidelines for not damaging the originals: Use a modern cool-light flatbed scanner--alternatively, a really high resolution digital camera in good indirect light works--no scanners where you poke the photo in one end and it drags the photo over the sensor then spits it out; don't force a bent (or curled or folded) photo flat; don't take framed photos out from behind their glass as they sometimes crumble; don't jar the old cabinet photos because the silvering may not be sticking very tightly to the glass it is printed on and may flake or powder away; don't work around food or liquid--which shouldn't be around your computer or scanner anyway, but in these days of laptops and portable scanners sometimes happens; never use a permanent marker or a ballpoint to write names on the back as it will bleed or poke through the materials--use pencil or a very fine felt tip pen, lightly. Scan at very high resolution (you can store the humongous images on CD) and high color depth, even the monochrome ones. Save the image as scanned, with a very descriptive name, even if it is just "LargeFlakyTintypeFromDadsCellar_UnknownFemale3.jpg".
Make a copy of the image file to work with in PhotoShop or PaintShopPro, and try things like heightening the contrast, lightening or darkening the whole image, changing the sepia tones to gray-scale (you would be amazed at the detail that sometimes comes out of this simple step--blank faces that suddenly have features, for example), increasing the saturation of the color in old snapshots, removal of red tint (sometimes the old polaroids go weirdly red over the years), removal of the virtual mildew spots (use a clone brush to grab the color from a nearby pixel), cropping the picture and enlarging the cropped area to get a clear view of the people, and so forth. There are loads of things to try, and as long as you have saved the original image, you can go back and make multiple copies to try different techniques.
Once you have one that you love, you can print on a high resolution color printer, on a photo printer, or even send the file online to your nearest Walmart one-hour photo center for prints.
If you do the third option, remember that the minimum-wage clerks sometimes have difficulty grasping the notion (or sometimes understanding your English) that a studio photo of your granddad at age two, taken back in 1907, is no longer under copyright. In this event, you will have to talk to a manager, in order to rescue your prints that the clerk is holding hostage with the intent of doing their duty to enforce copyright law.
You will end up saying to the clerk, "What do you mean, I can't have my photo? Look, that baby is my granddad! Look at the old clothes! Look at the shoes! No one makes anything like that today! The thing was taken over a century ago! The studio has been out of business since 1952! And the photography studio was owned by my grandmother's uncle, anyway, which makes it family property! It's my granddad as an infant! And I have white hair myself, you know this can't be a recent photo! How hard can this be to understand?! Oh, get the manager." You can then say the same thing to the manager, without exclamation points, and you won't have any problem. Just make sure you ask for the manager before you start tearing your hair out. There's no sense in messing up your own appearance for a photo's appearance, and you are much more credible to the manager if you don't look like a madwoman.
Of course, do check the applicable copyright laws before trying to make a print of a studio photograph, just so you know where you stand. You can't make a copy of your kid's graduation portrait from last year, or even your wedding portrait from 20 years ago unless you bought the copyright from the photographer, and most of us didn't because it was expensive, or unless you have a written permission from the photographer or studio.
One warning: this process is painstaking and intriguing, may cause eyestrain and backache, and can be habit-forming. Side effects include learning new things about image processing, computers, art, fashion through the years, and the role of genetics in family resemblance.
And as my grandma's dear friend and neighbor used to say (about 40 years ago, about doing petit-point embroidery), "It's teedjus work, very teedjus." For those of you who need a translator, as I did back in my childhood days, it's "tedious." For those of you who are still in the dark, as I was back in my childhood days, look it up in the dictionary. But while it is teedjus, it is nonetheless extremely fulfilling to see the image come clear right in front of your eyes. Which is doubtless why Grandma's friend did petit-point in the first place, as well.
I had the great pleasure, several years ago, to do a photo-restoration favor for my grandmother (not the funny little cuddly Dutchy one, but the stern upright one with the twinkle in her eye). She had a letter from her old high school that the old school building had burnt down along with all the photos of the graduating classes. Well, Grandmother was the last living member of the Class of 1928, and she had her old yearbook, and she wanted to do something for the school in time for the annual alumni banquet. (Incidentally, Grandmother's aunt and uncle really did own the studio where the portraits were taken. There was even an ad for their studio in the back of the yearbook.) So I scanned in the portraits of each of the members of her class (all eight of them), cropped them into ovals and arranged them into two rows on one background, labeled each oval with the student's name, added the name of the school and the class at the bottom, printed it out as a high resolution 8"x10" photo (how big does it really need to be when there are only 8 people?), and framed it. We sent it along with a nice donation letter that mentioned the predictions made concerning the members of the Class of 1928 in the Class Prophecy in the yearbook, along with the actual histories of the class members.
I loved the prophecies. I remember my grandmother was going to be a "bachelor-girl" who would start as a secretary and become a successful business woman who would remain single all her life. Her sister was going to become a nurse, marry a specific fellow in the class, raise a large family and live for many years, welcoming my grandmother into her home for flying visits between business trips. Another girl in the class was going to marry my grandmother's cousin (a member of the previous year's class) after she had been a flight stewardess or something like that. Well, my grandmother obviously didn't stay a "bachelor-girl"; she married my granddad, and I for one am grateful for that--I owe my existence to the fact! She was the one who raised a large family and became a nurse--she had 4 babies of her own, and helped deliver many more as a labor-and-delivery nurse--and lived for many years, to age 96, in fact. Grandmother's sister, I think, took a secretarial course, as she hated being around sick people; she did marry a fellow from the class, but not the one predicted, and she died in childbirth several years later. The other girl in the class did marry Grandmother's cousin (though she never became a stewardess and I'm not even sure she ever flew in an airplane!), but of course, I think the Class Prophet (my Grandmother) already knew that particular romance was in the air. Clearly the Class Prophet had certain ambitions, and either wasn't much of a prophet, or only "saw through a mirror, dimly."
And so this Thanksgiving (and always), I am thankful for memories, for photographs, for modern technology, for "unanswered" prayers, for friends, for hobbies, for genealogy.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Troubles Come In Threes
The old folks had a saying, "Troubles come in threes." If you had a death in the community, it would soon be followed by two others, or at least by two other events of equal nature and magnitude.
Well, I just hope that Lyme disease counts as one of my three troubles, because if it doesn't, I'm in for a whopper, after the death of my grandmother and the latest problem.
And what is the latest problem? Just the day after my last post, I had a call from my mother to say that my dad had fallen and they were going over to the hospital to check it out because his hands and feet had gone numb. She followed up that call with one to tell me that the x-rays and cat-scan showed that he had broken the 7th vertebra in his neck (the "C7") and that blood pooling inside the spinal column was compressing his spinal cord at the site of the break. The local hospital airlifted him to Virginia's big trauma center, the UVA hospital, where a really top-notch team of surgeons operated on him to stabilize the broken vertebra (actually, the whole cervical spine) and release the blood from the spinal column.
He's currently got feeling and movement in his arms, some limited movement in his fingers, and no feeling or movement below the waist. The doctors say there is some hope for a good recovery, but how complete a recovery, they don't know yet. We have to wait and see. The spinal cord wasn't severed, but no one can say yet how much of the paralysis is permanent nerve damage and how much is temporary and due to swelling and inflammation, from the accident or the surgery, which will subside over time. And even if it were all temporary, no one can say yet how long the swelling will last--they've said it can be anywhere from two days to many months. At least we know there are some indications that the entire length of the spinal cord is carrying some signal--hints of awareness about his feet, for example. Even with his eyes closed (and he's in no shape to bend his neck to look down at his feet at the moment, so I don't think he's "cheating") he seems able to sense when I am massaging his feet and even which foot I'm working on.
He's been moved from surgery to recovery to ICU to the regular neurological unit, and now to rehab at one of the facilities able to provide the acute level of inpatient rehab and therapy that he requires. We are rejoicing over the little steps of improvement, but it is going to be a long road to travel.
I've spent the last several weeks praying first for his life and then for his recovery, and driving my mother back and forth to the hospital, helping to entertain him, feed him and shave him, learning to help him cough, comforting my mom, helping plan for the future, and answering phones to dispense the latest updates to family and friends. I've had to promise to teach my mother to drive on mountain roads and to merge onto the interstate (driving not being one of her favorite things, my dad has always done almost all the driving). I've been home about 4 days in the past two and a half weeks. Thank the Lord that my husband is understanding and my daughter is old enough and mature enough to be helpful. At a guess, my mother is probably saying something similar about me. I guess it does take a few difficult times like these to remind a family about pulling together.
Incidentally, I never realized what an undertaking it could be to cough when the diaphragm won't cooperate. I guess it isn't paralyzed, just doesn't have the control and force needed for a cough. The respiratory therapists taught my dad to cough using the "quad-cough" method, which looks kind of like a cross between punching him in the stomach (open handed) and doing the Heimlich maneuver. He insisted they teach me how to do it, so they did. It works but it looks bad and makes everyone else in the room anxious to leave so no one blames them for witnessing a brutal attempted murder and not trying to put a stop to it. He says it helps, and I guess it is better than having him feel like he is drowning in phlegm. Anyone remember that old children's book, "Hop on Pop"?
I'm glad he's in a good frame of mind and going at this with a positive outlook and attitude. If it had happened to me, I'm not so sure I would be able to keep the right mindset. Of course, he does have thirty more years of experience and wisdom to draw on.
Now, wouldn't it be nice to be sure that his accident was Trouble #3 instead of Trouble #2...
Well, I just hope that Lyme disease counts as one of my three troubles, because if it doesn't, I'm in for a whopper, after the death of my grandmother and the latest problem.
And what is the latest problem? Just the day after my last post, I had a call from my mother to say that my dad had fallen and they were going over to the hospital to check it out because his hands and feet had gone numb. She followed up that call with one to tell me that the x-rays and cat-scan showed that he had broken the 7th vertebra in his neck (the "C7") and that blood pooling inside the spinal column was compressing his spinal cord at the site of the break. The local hospital airlifted him to Virginia's big trauma center, the UVA hospital, where a really top-notch team of surgeons operated on him to stabilize the broken vertebra (actually, the whole cervical spine) and release the blood from the spinal column.
He's currently got feeling and movement in his arms, some limited movement in his fingers, and no feeling or movement below the waist. The doctors say there is some hope for a good recovery, but how complete a recovery, they don't know yet. We have to wait and see. The spinal cord wasn't severed, but no one can say yet how much of the paralysis is permanent nerve damage and how much is temporary and due to swelling and inflammation, from the accident or the surgery, which will subside over time. And even if it were all temporary, no one can say yet how long the swelling will last--they've said it can be anywhere from two days to many months. At least we know there are some indications that the entire length of the spinal cord is carrying some signal--hints of awareness about his feet, for example. Even with his eyes closed (and he's in no shape to bend his neck to look down at his feet at the moment, so I don't think he's "cheating") he seems able to sense when I am massaging his feet and even which foot I'm working on.
He's been moved from surgery to recovery to ICU to the regular neurological unit, and now to rehab at one of the facilities able to provide the acute level of inpatient rehab and therapy that he requires. We are rejoicing over the little steps of improvement, but it is going to be a long road to travel.
I've spent the last several weeks praying first for his life and then for his recovery, and driving my mother back and forth to the hospital, helping to entertain him, feed him and shave him, learning to help him cough, comforting my mom, helping plan for the future, and answering phones to dispense the latest updates to family and friends. I've had to promise to teach my mother to drive on mountain roads and to merge onto the interstate (driving not being one of her favorite things, my dad has always done almost all the driving). I've been home about 4 days in the past two and a half weeks. Thank the Lord that my husband is understanding and my daughter is old enough and mature enough to be helpful. At a guess, my mother is probably saying something similar about me. I guess it does take a few difficult times like these to remind a family about pulling together.
Incidentally, I never realized what an undertaking it could be to cough when the diaphragm won't cooperate. I guess it isn't paralyzed, just doesn't have the control and force needed for a cough. The respiratory therapists taught my dad to cough using the "quad-cough" method, which looks kind of like a cross between punching him in the stomach (open handed) and doing the Heimlich maneuver. He insisted they teach me how to do it, so they did. It works but it looks bad and makes everyone else in the room anxious to leave so no one blames them for witnessing a brutal attempted murder and not trying to put a stop to it. He says it helps, and I guess it is better than having him feel like he is drowning in phlegm. Anyone remember that old children's book, "Hop on Pop"?
I'm glad he's in a good frame of mind and going at this with a positive outlook and attitude. If it had happened to me, I'm not so sure I would be able to keep the right mindset. Of course, he does have thirty more years of experience and wisdom to draw on.
Now, wouldn't it be nice to be sure that his accident was Trouble #3 instead of Trouble #2...
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Lyme Aid
Well, I managed to do something absolutely brilliant to my health.
Apparently it happened when I went to a family reunion in the mountains of Ohio in late June. We stopped to go cemetery hopping and try to find all the old folks' stones, and I was wearing short sleeves, capris and sandals. (I mean, come on, the cemeteries weren't THAT overgrown or I'd have been wearing jeans, boots, a hat, and a flannel long sleeved shirt and wielding a machete!) And, while that area was pretty scarce on deer back in the early 1900s, those mountains are full of deer and their delightful little plague-carrying passengers today. So I was bitten by a deer tick, which I didn't find for several days. Those things are minute, until they feed, and then they are merely tiny. Even when I found it, I didn't know what it was.
(Yes, all you western Ohioans, I know it is flat there where you are. Very flat. However, my people are, as my uncle put it once, hill-jacks from southeastern Ohio. Where it borders West Virginia. You know, that funny little state wedged into the corner between Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, that is nothing but mountains? Oddly, the mountains don't just stop at the state line.)
(And yes, all you folks from Colorado and points west, I know the Rockies and so forth are "real mountains" and you think the Blue Ridge and so forth here in the east are "just hills". Though I must point out that the mountains in the eastern U.S. are simply so much older that they have worn down and are therefore more to be admired for their stalwart presence over so long a time.)
Hmmm. Evidently Lyme disease causes irritability, too. I never realized that I was bothered by those things before.
Anyway, as I was saying, I was apparently bitten by a tick, and then started having really strange symptoms. I was exhausted and didn't want to drag myself out of bed, didn't have the energy to do much but flip the On-switch of my computer. ("I really have to get a good night's sleep or stop being lazy, or something. Or maybe my thyroid is sluggish.") My leg muscles started to ache, and then twitch--like your esophagus does with the hiccups. ("Must have overworked at something.") My joints in my hands and knees felt as if I had arthritis, except when they felt like someone was stabbing them with an ice pick. ("Wow, am I getting arthritis like my folks?") I had headaches (and neck aches) that wouldn't go away for days and extra floaters in my eyes. ("Slept wrong. No, ragweed. No, on second thought, migraine.") Food tasted and smelled rotten. ("Oooh, am I getting the flu?") I had dizzy spells. ("Maybe high blood pressure?") And worst, by late August, my brain took a vacation, and I'm not talking just forgetting where I tossed the car keys, my glasses, a pen, or the cordless phone--I'm talking forgetting the name of our hamster, of my dear friend at church, of that fast food restaurant half a mile from here that has those golden, what do you call them, arches. Couldn't think my way out of a wet paper bag. Couldn't finish a sentence, because when I stopped to try to remember the word I was after, I couldn't remember what I had been trying to say. ("Am I getting Alzheimers like my grandma?! God forbid--at least she was 80 when the symptoms started, I'm not even 50!")
So I went to the doctor and asked if I had hypothyroid, muscle strain, arthritis, high blood pressure, migraines, flu, and Alzheimers, suddenly and all at the same time. He asked if I had been bitten by a tick, and then I remembered the little brown thing ("Is this a skin tag?") I had pulled off my skin and thrown away in Ohio in June. He knows the area I was in and knows about the high deer (and tick) population there. So he said it sounded like I had Lyme disease, gave me a prescription for an antibiotic and took some blood to test. The test came back negative for Lyme, but apparently that doesn't mean it wasn't; just means I wasn't producing antibodies detectable by the test. So he told me to keep taking the antibiotic and that the symptoms ought to gradually go away. But not to worry. At least I got help during the early stages of the disease.
So I'm done with the antibiotic now, thank goodness, and my hands and knees don't hurt anymore, and I'm rid of the headaches (except the ones that really were from the ragweed, which should stop any day now when we get a good frost). I've only had one dizzy spell since finishing the antibiotic, and my brain at least sent me a post-card ("Wish you were here! I'll be back from vacation soon!"). I'm still having difficulty touch-typing, for some reason, but I expect that will come back soon too.
Do yourself a favor and make sure you wear long pants, closed shoes, and bug repellant if you are going to do genealogy research in a cemetery. Better yet, have a look at www.interment.net or at www.findagrave.com and see if the gravestone info you want is online, before you go outside. It's a jungle out there.
Apparently it happened when I went to a family reunion in the mountains of Ohio in late June. We stopped to go cemetery hopping and try to find all the old folks' stones, and I was wearing short sleeves, capris and sandals. (I mean, come on, the cemeteries weren't THAT overgrown or I'd have been wearing jeans, boots, a hat, and a flannel long sleeved shirt and wielding a machete!) And, while that area was pretty scarce on deer back in the early 1900s, those mountains are full of deer and their delightful little plague-carrying passengers today. So I was bitten by a deer tick, which I didn't find for several days. Those things are minute, until they feed, and then they are merely tiny. Even when I found it, I didn't know what it was.
(Yes, all you western Ohioans, I know it is flat there where you are. Very flat. However, my people are, as my uncle put it once, hill-jacks from southeastern Ohio. Where it borders West Virginia. You know, that funny little state wedged into the corner between Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, that is nothing but mountains? Oddly, the mountains don't just stop at the state line.)
(And yes, all you folks from Colorado and points west, I know the Rockies and so forth are "real mountains" and you think the Blue Ridge and so forth here in the east are "just hills". Though I must point out that the mountains in the eastern U.S. are simply so much older that they have worn down and are therefore more to be admired for their stalwart presence over so long a time.)
Hmmm. Evidently Lyme disease causes irritability, too. I never realized that I was bothered by those things before.
Anyway, as I was saying, I was apparently bitten by a tick, and then started having really strange symptoms. I was exhausted and didn't want to drag myself out of bed, didn't have the energy to do much but flip the On-switch of my computer. ("I really have to get a good night's sleep or stop being lazy, or something. Or maybe my thyroid is sluggish.") My leg muscles started to ache, and then twitch--like your esophagus does with the hiccups. ("Must have overworked at something.") My joints in my hands and knees felt as if I had arthritis, except when they felt like someone was stabbing them with an ice pick. ("Wow, am I getting arthritis like my folks?") I had headaches (and neck aches) that wouldn't go away for days and extra floaters in my eyes. ("Slept wrong. No, ragweed. No, on second thought, migraine.") Food tasted and smelled rotten. ("Oooh, am I getting the flu?") I had dizzy spells. ("Maybe high blood pressure?") And worst, by late August, my brain took a vacation, and I'm not talking just forgetting where I tossed the car keys, my glasses, a pen, or the cordless phone--I'm talking forgetting the name of our hamster, of my dear friend at church, of that fast food restaurant half a mile from here that has those golden, what do you call them, arches. Couldn't think my way out of a wet paper bag. Couldn't finish a sentence, because when I stopped to try to remember the word I was after, I couldn't remember what I had been trying to say. ("Am I getting Alzheimers like my grandma?! God forbid--at least she was 80 when the symptoms started, I'm not even 50!")
So I went to the doctor and asked if I had hypothyroid, muscle strain, arthritis, high blood pressure, migraines, flu, and Alzheimers, suddenly and all at the same time. He asked if I had been bitten by a tick, and then I remembered the little brown thing ("Is this a skin tag?") I had pulled off my skin and thrown away in Ohio in June. He knows the area I was in and knows about the high deer (and tick) population there. So he said it sounded like I had Lyme disease, gave me a prescription for an antibiotic and took some blood to test. The test came back negative for Lyme, but apparently that doesn't mean it wasn't; just means I wasn't producing antibodies detectable by the test. So he told me to keep taking the antibiotic and that the symptoms ought to gradually go away. But not to worry. At least I got help during the early stages of the disease.
So I'm done with the antibiotic now, thank goodness, and my hands and knees don't hurt anymore, and I'm rid of the headaches (except the ones that really were from the ragweed, which should stop any day now when we get a good frost). I've only had one dizzy spell since finishing the antibiotic, and my brain at least sent me a post-card ("Wish you were here! I'll be back from vacation soon!"). I'm still having difficulty touch-typing, for some reason, but I expect that will come back soon too.
Do yourself a favor and make sure you wear long pants, closed shoes, and bug repellant if you are going to do genealogy research in a cemetery. Better yet, have a look at www.interment.net or at www.findagrave.com and see if the gravestone info you want is online, before you go outside. It's a jungle out there.
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