On the Lighter Side

On the whole, this has been a discouraging week to me. Not least to note in this category is the Asbury situation. I am retroactively posting this entry, but if you look at the entry posted right after this one in sequence, you will find the thoughts of a faculty member at Asbury. My intuitions are with him or her as to what is really going on there.

But there were a couple of bright spots. One fun one, a student from an intermediate Latin class I "taught" at Asbury College in 1993 found me on the web, Jerald Walz. How he remembered my name I don't know. He's now working in DC at an institute (I think) relating to Religion and Politics. That was the year I was finishing up an MA in classics at the University of Kentucky while living in Wilmore. Fun!

The biggest bright spot was finding out what I have long suspected, namely, that my family background is Dutch. Most will know the embarrassing pronunciation of my last name Schenck ("skank"). I have long thought its weirdness probably belied a Dutch background rather than a German one (which would say "shank").

My cousin Tim has verified it. The answer came from a 1930 census, the year my great grandfather died of a burst appendix in St. Joseph's hospital in Kokomo (he himself lived in the country outside Frankfort and is buried in the cemetery of New Hope UM Church in the country there). We had never been able to figure out who his father was or where in the world he came from.

The census lists his father's birthplace as Holland and his mother's as Pennsylvania. Alas, my father's side is Dutch and my great-great grandfather must surely have arrived in this country from Holland in the 1860's or so (my great grandfather was born in 1871). Maybe he came to watch the Civil War?

Yeah!