So at Number 23 on the Echoes Music Chart for January of 2014 is Nightfall from Adam Hurst. Now of the 25 artists/albums listed there is really only one artist whose name I recognize and Adam is not it. Moby is really the only artist whose name I’ve known for more than a few months! Artist’s whose music i have recently explored include: Bombay Dub Orchestra(7), David Helpling and Jon Jenkins (10) and Darkside (9).
On this day in 1963, Barbara and Hugh Cassidy became the proud parents of a little baby girl, Eva. That little gill who began to sing and play guitar at the age of nine and by the time she was 11 was playing in a local band in and around the suburbs of Washington, D.C.grew up to have one of the my beautiful, soulful voices that I have ever heard. Then in 1996, at the age of 33 she was gone another victim of cancer in Eva’s case the cancer was melanoma. When she died, she was relatvely unknown outside of the Washington DC area. But in the DC area that knew her….
So I had a couple of life’s unexpected intrusions into my music listening this week. The latest was this morning when the front end of my car started to shake and rumble horribly. I hadn’t gone far so I turned around, and almost made it back home. But I knew I had to stop and pulled to the curb a block from home and checked. The front passenger tire had blown and was now off the rim. I checked in the trunk for the spare,. It was there, as was the jack. What was missing was the lug nut wrench. After a couple of calls I decided, the best option was to call AAA and have them change the tire. They did their usually good job and a service truck was there within the hour! Now I am sitting at STS waiting to get two tires. While the good thing is that I have two books that I am reading on the iPhone,(Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin and The Mayor of MacDougal Street) the bad news is that I forgot my headphones!
On this day in 1888 Marvin C Stone patented the drinking straw!! Stone, the son of Chester Stone, was born in Portage County, Ohio in 1842. Chester was well-known for his inventions of many machines including the cheese press and washing machines With Marvin the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. He started inventing things at an early age.
So it all started very innocently the other night, after I read in Walter Trout’s biography, that he was from Ocean City, NJ. Hey, I said to my wife, “I may be related to Walter Trout since I did have Trout relatives that lived in Atlantic City”. My Trout-Corson line goes back to the early 1800’s in the Cape May and Atlantic County area!! Anyway, my wife said that I should check out Genealogy Bank for recent obituaries. That started it – I went and looked at some obituaries and didn’t see anything and then I decided to put in the search John Trout who was my last known ancestor t o live in that area. What popped up was this article from 1863! 
Now this John Trout is my great-great grandfather Mark Trout’s brother. Well at least I think it is – my John Trout was listed as a Pilot in the 1860 census, and since there were no planes to pilot a steamboat would seem to be what he piloted.He also left two sons when he died in the same year and month as this article!! So I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that he is Mark’s brother!! Anyway, the point is it does help bring my ancestor to life – well not to life in this case, but at least a real person, who left a wife and two sons! After this find, I went on to put a variety of other names in to the Genealogy Bank search engine and I found quite a bit of new information, marriages, some deaths and otherwise interesting stuff. One of the names I put in was my maternal grandmother’s name Regars. What came up surprised me! Several newspaper articles came up about my grandmother Elva Regars It appears that she was very active in the Junior League of the Union Methodist Episcopal Church in Burlington. Here, an eleven year old Alva (Elva) is part of the musical Christmas entertainment at the Church on New Years Day! This is the same grandmother that I have memories of her giving me a sip of her beer as we sat in the dining area of the Bar on Broad Street in Beverly and the many times we had to pick her up at the Happy Bar in Beverly….. I always say it was the McCloskey’s that did in the Ashton’s!! 
Finally their was an article about a distant relative young eleven year old, Elmer Campbell {named after my 3rd great-grandfather) who had this experience……… 
I know it’s hard to read but the gist of the story is that young eleven year old Elmer was playing with his electric trains with a tumbler of auto antifreeze next to him, when he picked up one of the cars a spark ignited the fumes over the antifreeze sending flames over his clothes. At the hospital he was in serious but not critical condition! Anyway these articles and several others helped to bring my ancestors and relatives alive! In just the few hours that I’ve spent on-line, I can see that Ancestry.com, Genealogy Bank and Family Search have more databases on-line, than the last time I’ve worked on my family tree, so I guess in 2014 I have to really explore those databases and see if I can find some of my ancestors that I say were in the “Witness Protection Program” – LOL!!
So this afternoon, I received an email from Echoes, that included the top 25 albums for the month of December 2013. The album at number 9 was Hydrosphere by Divine Matrix. Since I deal all the time with things related to the hydrosphere, i.e. wetlands, storm water regulations, I thought it was a good album for me. Not that the album really had anything to do with those things the theme of the album is obviously water! The album was the second electronic ambient album that I listened to today. The first album was Jeff Greinke’s album Cities in Fog 1 & 2. Greinke’s album is a lot darker than Hydrosphere. Overall, I like Hydrosphere better because of its mellower mood.
So when I was growing up I had a handmade stocking that had my name Eddie stitched at the top of the stocking. The stocking unfilled is shown on the left. Now several years ago we found the stocking and it was hung with the rest of the family stockings on Christmas Eve. It didn’t take long for son Nicholas to notice that the stocking had a strange message on it when it was hung the opposite way! Not the exact message that you want to send on Christmas!!
