Contagious Genealogy: A Pandemic

It's hard to think I'm related to my family when discussing the topic of food. My generation, also known as Gen-Y or Millennial, is well known for dining out at restaurants or ordering meal delivery on the daily. It's even a rare occurrence to see me enjoying leftovers! There's something about the elapsed time between the food being cooked and it being ingested that I just can't stomach. So juxtaposing that lifestyle with those of my parents or grandparents feels like a world of difference. My parents, the Baby Boomers, really straddled the middle of two food cultures in America. They were born and grew up in a time where families gathered around the dinner table each evening to enjoy a home-cooked meal off the stove or out of the oven, which the matriarch of the family likely labored over for the majority of the day.  (Left to right: Edna (Dean) Millhouse, Tommy Hogg, Beatrice (Dixon) Dean Cole, Mary (Dixon) Hogg, Beatrice and Frannie Millhouse in front) Then, even...

I inherited my maternal grandmother's recipe card box after she passed away. To be honest, it's probably best served in someone else's hands. Perhaps my sister should take ownership, since I'm the least helpful in the kitchen. I have no interest in cooking or baking -- and detest the cleanup work after! My sister at least gets the urge to bake every now and then. In the meantime, the recipes all have a home in my pantry, with the exception of one that carries more weight in my opinion. My family's Chocolate Almond Bars are really just to die for.  I actually didn't think the recipe had been written down anywhere, but when I went searching through the box, sure enough, I found the card. And a few years ago, I decided it would be nice to memorialize that recipe in a special way for my mom's birthday. I was able to get it glazed onto a dish! An added bonus is that the recipe is written out in her mother's handwriting -- a very nice token to remember her by...

What are those stories that get passed down or talked about in your family that you've always wondered whether were true? I had the "we're descended from a Native American" tale, the "our ancestors came over on the Mayflower" thought, the "twins run in the family" bit, and many more, some of which have been debunked, some of which are absolutely true, and some that I still need to explore. To kick off the new year, I thought it best to revisit a connection my dad told me about when I was growing up. We lived in the "South Bay" in California, which was essentially all the cities directly south of Los Angeles near the beach (west of Anaheim and Disneyland).  There were two Bob's Big Boy restaurants on Hawthorne Boulevard in Torrance, one just south of Artesia Blvd., which became a Coco's some time before 2010 (and I remember eating once at the Coco's in the year leading up to my friend's wedding), and one just off of the Pac...

On 6 July 1936, my maternal great grand-aunt, Mary Lucretia (Dixon) Stalnaker, who was a widow, married her 2nd husband, Thomas Gilmore Hogg, in West Virginia. She was 43. He was 33 and had also previously been married. Tommy worked as a hired hand for the Dixons. The two had flirted with each other at the store owned by Mary's mother. Thomas was quite a different match from her first husband, Walter, who was 26 years her senior. This time, she'd be the older, wiser one of the relationship. Tommy and Mary (Dixon) Stalnaker Hogg, 1936 In a previous blog post , I wrote about the supposed suitors that Mary had, due to the sheer number of postcards she had received and kept from eligible bachelors back in her prime, before she was married. But many blogs previous to that one, I wrote of a "Spanish influenza" victim in my family tree who just happened to be photographed in front of a big brick house belonging to Mr. Thomas Hogg. To my surprise, Tommy Hogg's niece, Nan...

  JANUARY 31, 2021 Anyone that knows me, knows that you will rarely find me anywhere near the kitchen, except maybe during this pandemic, in which I’m practically forced to cook for myself out of necessity. It’s not that I’m a horrible cook, it’s really just the fact that I have absolutely no interest in the act of cooking or baking. Also, my least favorite thing is cleaning dishes, and those just stack up when you cook, so my solution is don’t cook. I also detest the fact that women are just assumed to be the default domestics of the family, but that’s an argument for another day. Week 5: In the Kitchen There were, however, some folks in my tree who gravitated toward the kitchen and left a breadcrumb trail of their activities in that room.  Photograph of Edna Arlene (Dean) Millhouse in the dining room off of the kitchen, 1 Jan 1984, Hawthorne, California, photo in possession of granddaughter Kira D. Foltz. My maternal grandmother, Edna Arlene (Dean) Millhouse, had a tradition...