I Stalk Dead People

Someone got buried in 1881, but probably not someone
named Mary Anne Maddicks

This blog is two years old, and this is the first time I’ve really covered genealogy. Oops. It’s odd that it hasn’t come up since not only have I used genealogical research over and over on this blog, but I’ve been researching my own genealogy for about the last sixteen years.

In the blog, I’ve used genealogical research to find out more details about the people I’ve written about as part of the general background material of the blog post. “Hey, this person seemed so active in the Esperanto movement. What happened? Oh, they suddenly died.”[1] The same techniques that go into finding out where great-great-grandpa lived.[2]

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A (Partial) History of Same-Sex Marriage

Marriage. Nothing new.

Same-sex couples may now marry in all fifty states, and people are beginning work on histories of the marriage-equality movement.[1] I hope that these histories go back far enough. There is a stark difference between this history of same-sex marriage and the history of same-sex marriage in the United States.

When I was listening the Obergefell hearing, I was not particularly surprised that several justices brought up the question of whether there were historical examples of same-sex marriage. I actually think this line of questioning was profoundly irrelevant. We can find plenty of historical examples, and even contemporary ones, for things that are prohibited by the constitution. I don’t need to go deep into history to find examples of the suppression of freedom of speech. Just as a lack of freedom of speech in other places and times says nothing of our rights, a lack (or even existence) of same-sex marriage in history would say nothing about whether or not it was part of basic human liberty.

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The Real Tale of Hanukkah

Hanukkah is the gambling holiday.
Purim is for drinking.

I’m no expert here, but let me cobble together some of the things I know about Hanukkah. When I converted to Judaism, my rabbi quizzed me about the Jewish holidays. I had to name them in sequence and discuss various matters about them. For Hanukkah, after I answered, he said, “Now tell the story everyone knows.”

“The oil lasted eight days.” If that’s all you know about Hanukkah, you know nothing. Sorry. But that can be helped. The traditional Hanukkah story adds a lot of stuff that early accounts don’t have and leave out a lot found in the early accounts. The primary early account are two books of Maccabees, which are included in the Catholic Bible (but are considered apocrypha by Protestants, as they do not form part of the Hebrew Bible). I keep meaning to re-read these around the time of Hanukkah. Today I’m just going to run from memory.

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William Reno Escapes Imprisonment for Sodomy — Eventually

"We charged him on the wrong thing"
isn't actually a technicality

It seems that William Reno was already known to the police when he was arrested on December 7, 1910. In 1908, he plead guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced from six months to two years imprisonment. The East Oregonian said that Reno “shot a companion named Goodell about three weeks ago as the outcome of a drunken spree.” But he wasn’t just a fighter. Most of the articles on him, are of a quite different nature.

His 1910 arrest didn’t involve any weapons, as far as we can tell from the news reports. Instead, he was arrested for sodomy.[1] The article seems to be inaccurate on several counts, one of which is in describing the other person involved as a “boy,” which strikes me as a little inaccurate for an eighteen-year-old.[2] I don’t know if Oregon had a different age of consent in 1910, but but I think we can be certain that it was no lower than 18 (which it is now). In 1910, no one could legally consent to gay sex, still the East Oregonian’s use of the word “pederasty” seems somewhat misapplied.

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Was the Baby’s First Word “Zamenhof”?

Special rates if you ask
in Esperanto?

People who don’t speak Esperanto are often amazed to find that there are birth speakers of Esperanto. The phrase for this in Esperanto is denaskaj esperantistoj, “esperantists by birth.” What typically happens is that a couple meets through the Esperanto movement, often with separate native tongues, and they use Esperanto as a household language, bringing up their children in this language as well.

On July 3, 1912, the Beckenridge News of Cloverport, Kentucky, published a short article on one such child. They didn’t name the child, so I set off to see if I could find any record of this, in order to flesh out the short item. Despite the tempting biographical details “one of the leaders in America of the so called universal language” and “is fifty-eight years old,” I hit a stone wall doing my research. This was a shame, because this child may have been the earliest denaska esperantisto born in the United States. But if he were such a leader, why couldn’t I find him in the Esperanto magazines of the era?

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The Real History of Same-Sex Marriage

Michel de Montaigne
A possible heterosexual who saw
where men married men

In Florida today, Matt Staver of the Liberty Counsel, an anti-gay law firm (they describe themselves as defending “Christian religious liberty, the sanctity of human life, and the traditional family”) testified at hearing in Miami today concerning whether the Florida ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

Staver appeared as an amicus, and if the courtroom had been struck by lighting each time he uttered an untruth, the building would be a smoking ruin. For example, he brought up the study done by Mark Regnerus, the University of Texas sociology professor, and made sweeping claims based on it. I actually think Staver’s description of Regnerus’s conclusions went far beyond anything that Regnerus actually claimed.

Staver also brought up Stanley Kurtz’s study of marriage rates in Scandinavia. I haven’t heard that one in a long, long time. Kurtz does have a Ph.D. in social anthropology, but he’s not an academic. His claim that same-sex marriage caused a drop-off in the rates of marriage in the Scandinavian countries was much loved by opponents of same-sex marriage. It was also debunked as soon as someone looked at the marriage rates the decade before same-sex marriage, when marriage was declining even more sharply.

But Staver’s biggest error was his claim that same-sex marriage didn’t exist in history before it was legalized in the Netherlands in 2001. Sorry, Mr. Staver, but your history is off.

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Poor Predictions for Huge Esperanto Congress in 1910

So many expectations

To call the predictions of the D.C. Esperanto group “wild optimistic” would be an understatement. Certainly, there was a lot of anticipation over the 1910 Universala Kongreso, the first World Esperanto Congress to be held outside of Europe. According to the Washington group, it was going to be the biggest yet. According to an article in the July 1, 1910 Washington Times, the congress would be hosting 2,500 delegates from thirty-five countries. Maybe.

At that point, the largest conventions to date were the 1908 and 1909 conventions, held in Dresden, Germany and Barcelona, Spain (though George Harvey had tried to secure one of these for Washington), which each had 1,500 members. The Americans were proposing that this convention would be the biggest by an another thousand people.

One part of looking at history is that I can see into the future, as it were, and I know that the 1910 Universala Kongreso was the second smallest ever, with the only more intimate one being the 1915 Universala Kongreso. Were they anticipating a huge surge of memberships that never actually came? Why did they tell the Times that the convention would be huge? The convention was six weeks away, in an era where spur-of-the-moment travel wasn’t exactly common. What I don’t know is what happened.

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More on Mrs. Hausdorf, an 1883 Legal Case

Yelling insults in the street?

Yesterday, I wrote about an item that appeared in the June 30, 1883 St. Paul Daily Globe. I was more interested in the story of Joseph Carp, who said that his "passions were unlike those of other men." Just to give some flavor to the piece, I noted some of the other people who came in front of the judge that same day.

A friend of mine wondered more about the argument between Mrs. Hausdorf  and Mrs. Reimer. I considered them amusing but ancillary, and didn't follow up on them at all. But I could.

Here's the full account, giving more than I gave yesterday:

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Welcome to Usono

Nia Usonestro
(from Wikipedia Commons)

It’s funny to think of a New York paper devoting this much space to a minor point of Esperanto usage, but on June 30, 1907, the New York Sun did exactly that with an article on how the new name for the country in Esperanto was Usono.

Despite the popularity the word had achieved, the older usage, “Amerika” was still retained in the principal magazine of the Esperanto movement in the United States, the Amerika Esperantisto, which would continue under that name at least until the 1930s. It finally stopped publication in the 1950s.

Happily, the article is not too long to quote in full (I’m a quick typist). The article appeared in the New York Sun on June 30, 1907. While it was a new coinage in Esperanto, in 1907, a lot of Esperanto was new. The language had vastly developed since 1887. The use of the word Usono dates back to 1905, and it seems it had quickly become established in Esperanto.

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Diplomat Predicts Things Will Be Great for Esperanto in America!

1908 will be a great year for
Esperanto speakers!

George Harvey said that the French Esperanto speakers had “a strong movement, destined to apparently to be crowned with success at no distant date, to add Esperanto to the curriculum of the public schools.” What the Deseret Evening News of Great Salt Lake City, Utah did not mention in their June 29, 1907 paper was that Mr. Harvey had something of a vested interest in Esperanto.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, he was an ardent backer of Esperanto in his magazine, The North American Review, and he would go on to be president of the Esperanto Association of North America. In other parts of his life, he was an ambassador and influential political figure.

In the article “Popularity of Esperanto,” Mr. Harvey did acknowledged that not all was rosy in France:

Despite the efforts of such eminent scholars as M. Beafront, official France has been slow to extend recognition to the new language, presumably because of a desire to maintain the position of their own as that of the world’s diplomacy; but we know from personal inquiry in the smaller towns that the French people are really enthusiastic over Esperanto, nearly every village containing a small group of students, and even the more intelligent innkeepers giving it earnest attention.

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President Polk Dies During Cholera Epidemic

Oo! Modern medicine

We'e stamped out certain diseases in the United States. Americans now have to travel great distances before they have have to worry about malaria and cholera, among other diseases. We are so used to the idea that these diseases belong to the far away, it's hard to remember that they also belong to the long ago.

The Edgefield Advertiser of Edgefield, South Carolina reported on June 27, 1849 on the death of James K. Polk. Polk had died on the 15th of June, but news travelled slowly in those days. He lived only a few months after leaving the White House, possibly a victim of cholera. This has an aspect of "a U.S. President died of what?" to it.

Yes, cholera.

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The Esperanto State that Didn't Happen

Will there be a phrasebook in
the travel guide?

On June 14, 1908, the San Francisco Call, repeating a story from the Kansas City Journal, reported on the attempt to create an independent state between Germany , Belgium and Holland. Moresnet had been created as a neutral zone in the treaties after the Napoleonic wars. The tiny territory actually existed for a century, finally being annexed by Belgium at the end of World War I (Belgium, itself, had been part of the Netherlands until 1830).

There was still the question of the fate of Moresnet, a valley with 3,000 inhabitants. There were various proposals to set up the place as an independent micro-state. In 1908, it was proposed that not only should Moresnet become independent, but should be an Esperanto homeland. The Call reported that

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Same-Sex Marriage: The (Bad) Argument from Tradition

The Anglican theologian Bishop N. T. Wright has made an argument against same-sex marriage in which he makes an appeal to tradition. Wright makes the claim that

the word “marriage,” for thousands of years and cross-culturally has meant man and woman. Sometimes it’s been one man and more than one woman. Occasionally it’s been one woman and more than one man. There is polyandry as well as polygamy in some societies in some parts of history, but it’s always been male plus female. Simply to say that you can have a woman-plus-woman marriage or a man-plus-man marriage is radically to change that because of the givenness of maleness and femaleness. I would say that without any particular Christian presuppositions at all, just cross-culturally, that’s so.

He suggests that given that history has never given us examples of same-sex marriage, there must be something radical about same-sex marriage. He’s wrong in many ways. Mordecai Kaplan, whose thoughts gave rise to Reconstructionist Judaism, said that tradition gets a vote, not a veto. But in his argument from tradition, Bishop Wright gives tradition the full veto. But arguing that same-sex marriage should not be allowed because it is not in the tradition, isn’t just an improper appeal to tradition, it’s also a misreading of history.

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The Illegal Language

And certainly no
chess problems in
Esperanto

On June 5, 1940, the New York Times announced that the German government had prohibited mail entering that country that contained, among other things, Esperanto.

In the future it will not be possible to send postcards or photographs attached to letters, Braille letters, chess problems, crossword or other puzzles through the foreign malls. Secret codes, except for a certain number of specified ones, are forbidden, as well as Esperanto or secret languages, shorthand of any system or lined envelopes.

It does make one wonder what the permitted secret codes are.

As I went to publish this, I realized I should have included this in yesterday's postings. While this was reported on June 5, it is June 4 that marks the anniversary of the Nazi ban on Esperanto.

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Esperanto and the Hebrew connection

I've long been fascinated by the by the connections between the creation of Esperanto and the revival of Hebrew. Both Ludovick Zamenhof and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda were born in the same part of the world, got involved in the early Zionist movement, and even had the same first name. Let's start with the elder Eliezer.

Eliezer Perlman was born in 1858 in Luzhki, Belarus. His parents wanted him to become a rabbi. He studied history instead. When he became part of the Zionist movement, he felt that reviving Hebrew as a everyday spoken language was of vital importance. He adopted the name Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. To that end, he raised his son, Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda speaking only Hebrew. Poor Ben-Zion didn't get to play with other children, because they spoke Yiddish.

Eliezer Zamenhof was born in 1859 in Bialystok, Poland. Like Luzhki, Bialystok was part of the Russian Empire. The places are about 250 miles apart. Eliezer, who later latinized his name to Ludovic, wanted to create a language to bring peace to the world. His parents wanted him to become a doctor. He did both, becoming an eye doctor and creating his "Lingvo Interncia," which we now all Esperanto. He also was involved in the Zionist movement. At one point, he suggested that the Jewish people seek a grant of land from the United States. Zamenhof is quoted in Aleksander Korĵenkov's Historio de Esperanto as saying:

Until we meet again, my people, in our own home, on the free banks of Mississippi. (Ĝis revido, mia popolo, en nia propra hejmo, sur la liberal bordoj de Misisipo.)

But Zamenhof noted that Hebrew just wouldn't do as the language of this new Jewish state ("state" as a part of the United States of America). Instead, he proposed Esperanto as the new language of the Jewish people.

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