Twenty-five Things

Here is a list of twenty-five things about me - in no particular order and of no particular value.

1. When I was younger, it used to bother me that I was so tall. Now, it is what it is.

2. I could watch the movie Airplane! over and over again, continuously.

3. When my right hand was crushed in the Navy and my index finger was nearly severed, my reaction was only mild annoyance.

4. I probably worked too much during the early part of my career. In one two year period, I worked three years. That's too much.

5. I am very happy with how my children turned out, I wish I'd had something to do with it.

6. I wish I had the opportunity to ask family history questions of my parents and grandparents. But that's not going to happen.

7. I find genealogical research to be like what Hal was referring to in 2001 A Space Odyssey when he said, "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use which is all I think that any conscious entity can hope to do."

8. I hate it when I have no one to blame but myself.

9. Writing in this blog is surprisingly satisfying.

10. My cursive writing was so bad when I was young that I have been printing everything I've written my whole life.

11. I am not Mr. Spock.

12. My taste in music has been evolving. I seem to enjoy things of a more mellow nature now. For heaven's sake, what's up with that?

13. Alcohol is a gift that I find difficult to refuse.

14. I know enough about Microsoft Windows and the tools necessary to support it to be an effective systems administrator. What do normal people do when their home computer goes all 'Windows' on them?

15. I have had many, many different jobs in my life but I've been with my current company for 31 years.

16. I really like glazed doughnuts.

17. I have a vision for Maryland genealogy where everyone's family history connects to everyone elses in a single metadatabase. I have the same vision for all the Kleyleins in the world.

18. I have very vivid dreams and sometimes I can remember them in great detail.

19. My favorite color is blue.

20. I have been walking since I was eight months old.

21. I have been to almost every state in the United States.

22. Simon and Garfunkel were right when they said, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

23. If I had actually kept a 'Journal of Unexpected Results', I would be on volume three hundred by now.

24. I once won a Caribbean vacation just by dropping my name in one of those 'Win a Prize' boxes at an appliance store.

25. I have learned that you never know what will happen next.

Bonus: I have been sending out a 'QUOTE OF THE DAY' for twelve years. Today's quote was:

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

- Burke Breathed, Bloom County

Social Networking

I've been doing genealogy research for a while now. And as I've mentioned before, there are all kinds of angles to it, history, demography, geography, etc. Now we can add Social Networking as a genealogy tool. At the end of November, my daughter helped me get set up on Facebook, LinkedIn and this whole blogging thing.

Since then I've made contact with a boatload of Kleyleins around the world. Kleylein is a fairly unusual name, relatively speaking (that's a genealogy joke). As a boy, I hated how different it was but as a genealogist, it is absolutely wonderful. Any Kleylein I run into can usually trace their ancestry to Unterrodach (or Oberrodach) in Bavaria and chances are pretty good that we're related. You can see where the town is by finding the little red dot I've made on the map of Germany. Notice that it is very near the old border of East Germany.

This is the little town my grandfather Peter Kleylein emmigrated from back in 1889. It's in Oberfranken near the Frankenwald Nature Preserve in an area that looks very much like central Pennsylvania. As a matter of fact, when we visited Germany we commented that the area there looks a lot like Pennsylvania, but with castles.

Kleylein is apparently a very old name, so old it doesn't conform to modern German spelling rules which would have it appear as Kleilein. Some of my German colleagues have even intimated that perhaps it is not a German name so I made fun of their heritage too.

Some of the families in town actually changed the spelling to Kleilein and there are still both spellings in town and around the world. As a matter of fact, there were so many Kleyleins that they hyphenated their last names to tell one another apart. There are names like Kleylein-Sohn, Kleylein-Feuerstein, and my family Kleylein-Weltdicker although many have dropped the hyphenated second name when they move somewhere where there is only one Kleylein family.

Now between Facebook and LinkedIn, I've found other Kleyleins in Germany of course, but also Switzerland, Austria, Canada, Argentina, Australia and in the US. How about that! Now the families who grew up around the river Rodach who are the descendants of the Flößers (rafters) who cut down the trees, lashed them together and floated on them to the sawmills are in every corner of the earth and we can find each other because of the Internet.

Just a few years ago, I could do a search on 'Kleylein' and get 25 hits. I just Googled 'Kleylein' a minute ago and got 21,000 hits and another 51,000 for Kleilein. So, we have plenty of raw information now, we just need a super-meta-knowledge-base to correlate it for us. In the mean time, I'll just keep working through the list one Kleylein at a time. I'm glad it's not Smith.

The Sound of a Train in the Distance

Last night, before I went to bed, I heard the sound of a train whistle in the distance. That's not so common nowadays and I know the only active train tracks in the area are miles away, so the sound had carried a long way.

In a fairly direct way, I owe my very existence to trains. My grandfather Peter Kleylein (below) emigrated from Unterrodach in Bavaria and as a young man found himself in Baltimore as a baker. He wasn't a baker when he left Germany, his occupation was listed as 'joiner' which could be anything from a carpenter to a sawmill worker. It would make sense that he would work with wood, since the major occupation in Unterrodach was lumberjacking and floating the trees to sawmills. There's a museum there dedicated to the history of Floessers. The German word (floater) has a kind of frontier mystique about it, like the American cowboy. The occupation 'joiner' may have been selected by the immigration people since there is no American translation for 'floater'.

These guys cut the trees down, dragged them down the mountains, lashed them together and rode the rafts thus created miles down the river to the sawmills and then made their way back home. Some of these rafts were big enough to have cabins on them where the men lived while they floated downstream. Of course there was a river in Unterrodach, the Rodach River (see Number 10 on the map below) that fed the river Main.
But my grandfather decided not to pursue this life and instead joined his brother Johann in Baltimore. However, when Peter arrived, there wasn't too much of a lumberjack operation going on in downtown Baltimore. Peter arrived alone in 1889 to join Johann and without lumberjacking available, he became a baker. He was sixteen.

In all the research I've done on Peter, his occupation never changed. His first documented job in the United States was baker and that's what he was doing when he died of tuberculosis in 1925.

By then he had gone through a lot of hard events in his life which will be fuel for other entries in this communication mechanism. But what has all this baker business got to do with railroad trains and my existence? You see, I try to make these things a big circle and answer the questions that have popped up in the beginning.

The circle has to do with the Baltimore Ravens stadium and why they named Mount Airy, Maryland 'Mount Airy' in the first place.

Back before the Interstate highway system (or highways. . . or even automobiles) the transportation system of choice was railroads. The B&O Railroad (Baltimore and Ohio) had a huge hub right in the middle of Baltimore. The stadium complex there in downtown Baltimore is built on the site of that huge B&O railroad station hub. Interestingly, that was the first railroad station built in the United States. This was 1828.

If you follow the rails west after Ellicott City from Baltimore on the map above, a couple of stops later is Mount Airy named for the cold, clean air carried over it's rather modest summit. It was clean enough to create a better atmosphere for those suffering from the crowding and bad air quality of cities like, say. . . Baltimore. So the Garrett Sanitarium was built in Mount Airy to treat people suffering from such lung diseases as tuberculosis.

So the youngest of eight of Johann Andreas Kleylein and Katherina Shaller took the B&O steam train west to Mount Airy and there met my grandmother Hallie Harrison, the youngest of twelve of Nimrod Harrison Jr. and Sarah Watkins.

The Harrisons and Watkins' had been in Maryland and Virginia since the dawn of time. John Watkins sailed with John Smith for heavens sake. And the Harrisons are part of the Virginia Harrisons that produced two presidents.

The story of how exactly it happened that these two met and became interested in one another is unfortunately not available to me. Yet. Perhaps it can be discovered at some point how a tubercular German immigrant baker who presumably spoke with a heavy foreign accent met and charmed a girl thirteen years younger than him whose family had already been in America for 300 years. I'm sure Nimrod and Sarah were thrilled with the prospect. He was twenty-nine when they married and she was sixteen.

The sound of a train in the distance has always been wistful and romantic. It carries with it the prospect of traveling to new places and meeting new people and having new adventures. As it happens in this case, all of those things were true.

Part of that adventure was the three boys this couple had, the oldest of which was my father Leon (below). What was it like for Peter and Hallie when they were first married and lived in Baltimore? Remember, these were the youngest of both families. I know for quite a while they lived on Barre Street in Baltimore just a few blocks east of the B&O Terminal so it was an easy commute for the sixteen year old Hallie to get back to Mount Airy. Barre Street is still there in a fairly well preserved state because it was trapped between the terminal and the waterfront which was a couple of blocks to the east. Now the terminal is the stadium complex and the waterfront is Inner Harbor. The noise and smoke and dirt from the rail complex is gone, but the results of it's existence are still with us.
I know, because I'm part of it.