On my recent cruise trip to the Canadian Maritimes, our Daily Post onboard always carried a very corny boat-joke-of-the-day. On a (hopefully) hot day before the July 4th weekend, I share these silly jokes with you:

*What’s a sailor’s favorite detergent?  Tide!

*What happens when a red sailboat hits a blue sailboat? They get marooned!

*Have you seen the movie where the Wizard sails his ship across an ocean of orange soda? It’s a Fanta Sea flick.

*Why do pirate have trouble remembering the alphabet? They always get lost at “C.”

*I went to a Black Friday sale at the boat store….. it was quite an oar deal.

*How do you know when a boat is feeling affectionate? When it hugs the shore.

*Where do sick ships go?  To the Dock.

*A dentist opened an office on a boat; what was the boat’s name? The Tooth Ferry.

*Why didn’t the sailors play cards? ‘Cuz the captain was standing on the deck.

*How to make a boat feel better?  Give it some Vitamin Sea.

*What do you call a boat full of buddies? A friend-ship.

*Making a boat out of stone would be a hardship.

*When do you know you’re getting a good deal on a boat? When there’s a sail on it.

*Where do zombies like to go sailing? The Dead Sea.

 Are you laughing or groaning????

I just finished a great read: Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England, by Ruth Wallis Herndon, 2001. I had no clue about this part of Colonial history!  Here’s what I learned:

In 18^th century America, there was no Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment insurance or old age pensions, no welfare of any sort…… “no colony or state created and maintained a safety net for those unable to support themselves.” Thousands of our ancestors living on the margins due to injury, health, discrimination, or poor choices had an extremely rough time just staying alive.” Each local government administered “poor relief” to its own inhabitants and almshouses or poorhouses were constructed so that needy people could be grouped together and helped.

In New England, town officials met regularly to raise taxes due to the high cost of poor relief. This was especially true when the Revolutionary War, with tremendous expenses, loomed.  One method sought to resolve this tension was the “warning-out” system. This was the way town authorities sent away from their towns those people who had no legal claim on the town treasury. Through warnings-out, towns avoided the greater costs of supporting frail, ill, or injured people long term.

One facet of this system was that such needy people were shunted back to the town of their birth; being born in XX town, it was XX town’s responsibility to care for them. Sometimes this meant dividing up families! If a family of five were all needy and candidates for being sent elsewhere, they could be sent to five different towns, regardless of the children’s ages.

The book is 200 pages of carefully researched case studies that really brought this situation, this problem, to life for me. Cost for the paperback was under $7 via Amazon books. If you have New England ancestry who were not among the well-off, this might be good history for you.

June is my only daughter’s birthday month. She was born in June and I remember well her naming story. Looking through a women’s magazine, I spotted an ad for Ivory Soap. It was not this exact one (below) but I could not find “the real” one. It showed a baby in a bubbly bath and the words were something like “Jane Elizabeth enjoys her Ivory soap bath.”  Well!  Husbnd’s mother was Esther Mary, so we quickly fell in love with Jane Esther and that’s what she became. And that’s how we found her name.

My name is Donna Ruth; I was named after my Aunt Ruth. Four years earlier, Aunt Ruth had a daughter she named June Ellen, after my mother, June.  And the Donna part? From a 1942 novel by Daphne du Maurier, Frenchman’s Creek. How do I know? I asked mom!

My dentist used to be Frank Vedelago. His partner dentist in the same building was Stephen Carnell. They were brothers! Deciding to go into dental practice together but with separate practices in the same building, they realized that with two Dr. Vedelagos there would be confusion. So they tossed a coin and Stephen took their mother’s maiden name, Carnell. And his children all went by that surname too. 

Years ago, in one of my classes, a young woman had a seriously difficult family history problem. The family looked every bit Italian, dark hair and eyes and beautiful olive skin. But the great-grandfather’s name was Lars Swenson. What? (This was obviously before DNA.) On his deathbed, Grandpa Lars told the truth: When he was a newly arrived immigrant, he got drunk, was rolled and his money and papers stolen. Realizing the situation, and seeing another fellow drunk in the corner, “Lars” took that fellow’s papers and became in name, if not in fact, Lars Swenson. And on the point of death, he could not remember his real, Italian, surname. True story.

How did your parents pick your name? If you have folks to ask, ASK! And realize, when researching your family tree and come up against a seemingly impossible brick wall, remember that our ancestors were survivors……..and that’s why we’re here today.