Part 2 of the pictures

Part 1 of the thesis

Part 1 of the pictures

He was a in a company of Light Dragoons under Col. Bland in Petersburg, Va. He served for 2 1/2 years, first collecting provisions in the neighborhood as a guard and later as a guard of prisoners taken by Gen. Washington at Princeton. He was in the battles of Brandywine (Sept. 7, 1777), Germantown (Oct. 4, 1777), Monmouth (June 28, 1778) and Guilford Court House (Spring of 1781). Of the Battle of Monmouth, he wrote:

“In June when the British left Philadelphia we were ordered to pursue them. At Monmouth we had another severe battle with them. General Lee (Charles Lee) brought on the battle but Gen. George Washington had to come up and restore some unfortunate order which he had given my company.”

(Even my ancestor knew Lee was a loser, jfc)

He was honorably discharged in the fall of 1778. After, he served several Militia Tours in Kentucky. The espionage part of his career took place here, where he spied against the British-Indian forces in the area. Unfortunately, he was under the command of General George Rogers Clark for "three months against the Indians on the Big Miami in the fall of 1782”. This probably doesn’t this refer to the Battle of  Blue Licks (August 19, 1782) where the Kentucky militia got their asses handed to them and Clark got severely criticized even though he wasn’t there. It would have been referenced in the file if he’s been in another battle. It most likely refers to the time immediately after during Clark’s revenge campaign, where he and his men went up the Great Miami and “destroyed five unoccupied Shawnee villages”. From what I’ve been able to find about that campaign, “there was no general engagement” “since the Shawnees refused to stand and fell back to their villages on the Mad River” so the likelihood that my ancestor actually killed anyone at this time is slim, thank the Fates. 

Trying to do genealogy research without access to the paid databases and stuff is weird but so much fun. It's fascinating to see how my research and my mom's research overlap and agree with each other given how totally different the modalities we're using are.

My mom's more of a classical historian. She crawls through historical records, census forms, newspapers, goes out and takes rubbings of tombstones, things like that. We once organized the route of a cross-country move purely to hit towns she could do research in. She hit a stall for a long time on her grandparents' hometown, because she didn't know what port they came in through.

I'm doing more ethnographic type research. When my mom's research stalled, I grabbed census records from the right time and country and found the counties where there were a lot of families with the same name and profession. I took the handful of Welsh words we'd inherited that were dialect-specific and narrowed the field more using that. And when we did finally find a marriage record I turned out to be so close, like, within a handful of miles.

I think I'm now the only person left doing research into my dad's side of the family (which is uh... really important because boy do we have some transgenerational issues to work out there), and I'm keeping the above in mind while I do it because there is this teeny little voice of doubt that goes: "Well you're using memories of family stories and we know how accurate both memory and family stories are."

But the more I do research into the history and cultural environment, the more those stories make sense. Even/especially the ones that had me going "Grandma that sounds made up." Like, shrines to Tanit on the Azores? Yeah right, the Azores was uninhabited until-- Oh no, no that's a real thing. "We're not French but my parents thought a French name would be advantageous." Kinda makes sense in historical context. "Dad stressed that it was very important to lay out a garden based on the Quran." Kinda weird for a 'Catholic'-- Oh no that makes sense too.

The Lady of Elche. She's very famous. And in most books I've read about the Celtiberians, or when I see reenactors of the same, she is almost always presented as a Celtic thing for some reason. But she's Punic. Part of a general corpus of similar busts like this.

These statues are all funerary art, urns containing ashes, and are associated with Tanit (who in general seems to have some association with funerary rituals in general, she's also associated with tophets).

It might be that this erasure only happens in the Anglophone world, I don't know, I am about a decade out of date on recent scholarship, but there's just a weird parallel here with my family's relationship with "being Portuguese-American." The thing about the Portuguese-American community, you gotta understand, is it is instant friendship with someone. It's the ultimate icebreaker if you have this in common. But once we get over that hump this weird thing happens of...

"Oh you should come over! We'll have fadobo!"

"Oh, uh... well... I grew up eating Moroccan food? Like, halal-ish?"

"..."

"But sure, sounds good!"

"What town's your family from?"

"Well my grandmother's family moved to the Azores when she was a kid, but originally--"

"Oh, so you're not really Portuguese, then."

So here I am translating another Czech thesis page by page through google translate. This one is probably of interest to only me! 😜 It is a history of the church and parish in my great-grandparent’s village in Moravia.

The Church of the Holy Trinity is a Roman Catholic church in Běhařovice in the Znojmo District . It is protected as a cultural monument of the Czech Republic. It was built in Gothic style in 1596 by the owner of Tavíkovice, Jiří Kryštof Teuffel, the holy lord of Gundersdorf. It was dedicated to the Holy Trinity . It underwent a thorough renovation in 1884. The church is a valuable Renaissance monument with Gothic reminiscences, a dominant feature of the village and its surroundings. It is the parish church of the Běhařovice parish

Part 2

Part 1 of the pictures

Part 2 of the pictures

Original Text in Czech:

In the process of moving, she gave to my mother a watch that she said belonged to her grandfather, Charles. I could see that it's very old just from the condition and the fact that it's a pocket watch.

I did a little looking and saw that there's some initials in the back of the case, "WAR", which suggested that it belonged to Charles' father, W. Aaron.

I pressed and turned a little on the back of the case, and discovered that it can turn. I took the back of the case off looking for a serial number on the movement (because I was looking for details on the watch itself) and discovered that the inside of the case had further proof of ownership to Watkin Aaron Ravell.

I’ve had the Divinner’s design in my head for a long time and this is the first time I’ve ever been happy with what I put down on paper --;

the Divinner is very cynical and jaded. Her sense of humour is very dry and sardonic, absolutely rife with gallows humour. Being a slave owned by a psychopathic womanchild, watching friends get cut down by said womanchild and being dressed up as a ‘pretty doll’ for most of her life has really worn her down :C

she doesn’t smile much. The Gardener is one of the few folks who can make her smile genuinely, though she does laugh at the Composer’s eccentricity. She fakes smiles a lot around the Reckless, but that’s out of necessity.

she hates that she has to put so much effort into her appearance, and the robes that the Reckless puts her in make it very difficult for her to do much other than walk around and look pretty - which is exactly what the Reckless intended. The Divinner gripes that if/when she gets free, she will N E V E R wear anything even remotely fancy ever again!!

in the humanverse, she works as a fortuneteller on the side (main job is undecided so far) and is a very deadpan mom to Majora and her older sister (dancestor)

one of her very last journal entries to Majora directly says simply, “tell her you love her”. Her last journal entry proper just says “three days till it falls” over and over again...

Godtier!Majora:

she dies on her quest bed the same way the Divinner did, a hole blown through her chest. 

she gets a lot quieter after the initial burst of godly immortality. Spends a lot more time sitting away from the others, looking up into the skies, just to take it all in. She can’t see everything, but space is of course incredibly vast and she wants to get as much information as she can.

the more she sees, the darker her eyes get. Eventually they just go completely black but you can see galaxies in them!

she sometimes wears sunglasses just to be an asshole despite not needing them anymore

UNNAMED DANCESTOR who I might name Kaguya?? Or some variant of:

a hardcore lesbian :b

she has a very witchy aesthetic, and as well is a very outspoken feminist, to the point where she talks over other trolls who are lower on the blood caste than she is (she’s literally in the middle of the hemospectrum)

she wants to go down fighting the System, she has a pretty big complex about proving herself - she feels that she really needs to live up to the Divinner’s legacy

she is a Witch of Space (meaning that the Divinner was an extremely powerful one in her timeline), but in a different way from Jade in canon. She does not godtier, but was working on being able to harness cosmic energies to aid the players in her session

Other points that I would like to make are that in the humanverse, all three of them are connected to/are working in space/astronomy/astrophysics field; Majora is (in the university AU at least) is majoring in astrophysics, for example.