Mysteries in a Public Bathroom: Chapter Twenty-Something

[mer]

Scene: a bathroom stall. The floor is wet (per usual) but also littered with confetti-like strips of toilet paper and...

Cake crumbs?


Speculation: one-person bathroom-stall birthday party. For the loneliest, creepiest girl in the world.

Comments

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Nothing to do with anything else, but I just happened to note that in Dutch, "merrie" means "mare". THought you might like to know,

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

No way! Merrie was supposedly my Dutch ancestress's name, but we always assumed that it was some Ellis Island fuck up. Or my great-grandmother's crazy interpretation of her mother-in-law's first name. (That latter isn't so far-fetched: Great-Grandma's mom was Amelia, and her mother-in-law was Merrie (or Mary; it's spelled inconsistently everywhere), and my most recent namesake, my grandfather's older sister, was Merrie Emilia. You see how we made assumptions...) Merrie always seemed like, well, "merry."

This is cool. Fear my Dutchness!

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Have you looked for them on the Ellis Island website? It's a lot of fun to play with. You can see original ship' registers, even (warning: some of those are two pages and it often brings up the 2nd page, without the names - so scroll back one). I was able to find all kinds of great-grandparents / aunts on it. In my case he first names varied quite a bit, even between, say, the wife's record of the husband she was going to meet in the US and the husband's record from his own sailing, some months earlier.