More Fun with Newspapers.com
But I should probably be more focused on the actual work of the book...
Tool: TimeWarp
Like a lot of people, I have a hard time focusing on the work I am supposed to be doing instead of either scrolling through tangential information on the internet or checking in on social media (and all of this is so much harder to put down when things on the national stage seem always to be erupting). So I’m trying out TimeWarp, which is a Chrome extension meant to help me keep track of how much time I spend waste on sites I’ve chosen (particularly Facebook and Twitter, but I should probably add Newspapers.com). So far, it mostly means I keep my phone next to my computer and just use it to access those sites, so I’m not sure it’s helpful.
More Cool but not Useful to the Book Things I’ve Recently Found on Newspapers.com
Maybe the most surprising thing I’ve found recently is that when he was ten, my grandfather Einstein discovered the body of a boy his own age who had drowned. If this had been something that happened on the Polan side of my family, there would be stories about it (probably embellished ones), and a shared way of telling it. Family stories are a very big part of being a Polan, even when the versions of the stories diverge from one another. But I don’t really have Einstein family stories, in part I suspect because my father’s mother was an alcoholic and drug addict, and so it was a family that kept secrets instead.
The few stories I do know from my father’s childhood are not happy ones; in fact, by current standards, they are often stories of abuse or neglect.
I do know that my great-grandfather Einstein was a minister who switched from the Presbyterian to Unitarian church after being disillusioned by what he saw serving as an Army chaplain during WWI. Traces of this change can be found in Virginia newspapers of the time:
Eventually, John Einstein Sr. left the ministry altogether, and he and his wife began a school for girls. They were also unsuccessful at that endeavor. All I know about his wife is that she was a music teacher and a singularly unpleasant person.
My father was a lovely, if not uncomplicated, man. Looking into his side of my family history fills me with sadness at how difficult his early life was, and how little of the love and protection that defined my childhood was afforded to him. But I take a lot of comfort in how thoroughly the Polan side of the family embraced him, and how much he knew and understood that.
We like to say that you become a Polan where you marry a Polan, and for Dad, that was certainly true. In the hospital right before he died, he was asked for his family medical history. He recited the causes of death for my grandfather Polan and his brothers; he never mentioned the Einstein side of the family at all. I’m not sure that was helpful to his doctors, but it makes me glad that he finally got the loving family he deserved, and who continued to regard him as family in the years after my parents divorced.