I was a bit depressed because I got another bothersome inmate request for the worst part of a trial, the jury selection known as the voir dire, from 1988. I had to do that section last year for his co-defendant, because it had been reported but never typed up because the co-defendant had pled guilty, which knocks out anything that happened up to that point during the initial appeal process. At any rate, as we discovered, I actually had a hearing in 1993 on this very matter, indicating that I can't transcribe what I didn't report, and I wasn't in the courtroom during the jury selection (which was, luckily, the usual case). I had other proof in other places, including my log, but that hearing is in the court record, and my sigh of relief was probably heard whooshing through the air over the city. This business of continuing appeals forever, unless there's something definitely wrong that hasn't been discovered earlier such as the recent DNA case reversals, is wasteful in every sense, certainly mine. But I was very startled--after resuming some Buddhist studying about the interconnectedness of everyone and everything--to do a crossword today that started with 1 down as "Omaha" ("Warren Buffet's hometown") and included "voir" as an answer for "____ dire (jury selection process)."
Anyway, yesterday, returning from filing my affidavit that the inmate's got all he's ever going to get from me (and stop bugging me!!), I bought a little tripod. In order to do family history, I've tried to photograph the family album pictures, which I've glued in solidly on the large pages ("Do Not Remove"). But I shake, and the tripod does help, as I'm going to prove right now.
Here are two versions of our earliest family photo, barring a mysterious tintype of a child. What I have written below is: "The Reverend George F. Twigg. Born in Halifax, England, Aug. 19, 1810. Grandfather of E. L. Peters. Daughter Sarah Ann (b. 15 May 1834 d. 17 March 1916) married John Peters (b. 4 January 1830 d, -- 1920). 'Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined.' Alexander Pope, Moral Essays I." That last poetic line is one the Peters family often quoted.
The Reverend Twigg is Gram's great grandfather, E.L. Peters being her father. E.L., Edward LeRoy (b. 9 October 1857 d. 5 September 1930), my great grandfather, looked like this:
Edward and Mary's homestead in Rock County north of Newport, Nebraska, what I've been calling the farm Up West where Grandma and Grandpa Koftan and Audree and Earl lived at various times looked like this in 1911. I'm guessing the color is brown. This is where (Great) Grandpa and Grandma Peters had social gatherings to recite poetry and other literature. They were movers in the local Chautauqua circle, as I understood from Gramma Koftan and Mom. As noted previously, they are buried in the Randolph (NE) Catholic cemetery by (Great) Uncle Glenn and his wife, Paula.
The stained-glass section over the big front living room window can be dimly seen and now is in Cousin Penny's possession through Cousin Denny, I think, over in Iowa. The place as I knew it in childhood looked like this:
The house and yard are to the right. To the far left is the little barn I considered the worst muck I ever had to be in, sinking in mud and manure up to my calves. The white building in the foreground was the hog barn where we watched sows birthing their litters. Behind it is the big corn crib with central opening for the tractor and such, where Grampa butchered hogs. Barely visible behind it is a white chicken house under which I had to get out the baby skunks. ( All of these comments have been in previous entries.) And behind that is the red chicken coop. Way up in the right-hand corner is the school, the social center for the neighborhood, especially for card parties, with a playground we'd walk up to use. Across on this side of the road from the schoolhouse once stood a large general store once run by (Great) Uncle John and Aunt Nellie Feddersen.
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