Gladiolas . . . Hot

In our local paper, it said that Healdsburg had a temperature of 110° yesterday. the second time in a couple of weeks. Granted, it is not like Needles, California nor like Palm Springs, both around 120°, but anything over 100° to us is hot.

And it stayed hot late into the night. We kept the a/c on past midnight and even then it felt warm outside. I am beginning to think that rainy weather would be preferable.

The gladiolas though seem to like the heat as do other plants like the lavender. We just have to water more often -- and we do now that the drought is somewhat gone.

The yellow in the gladiola is brilliant in the morning sun. And the bees are working the lavender extensively. If you click to enlarge you can see many of the bees at work. I wonder where they disappear when their work is done.

The neighborhood seems extra quiet these last couple of days. School is out and some folks have left on vacations probably to cooler locales. We actually start the day feeling cool inside and by late evening the sun has done its work and we are feeling the heat.

I've mentioned it many times before, but we lately have had a jigsaw puzzle up in a constant state of being worked on . . . we enjoy being able to leave the puzzle out and then we can work on it whenever we are inclined.  Often we are listening to the TV with a ballgame on and the Giants losing another one. Recently though the Giants have won several of their games and that is more to our liking.

Off to the right is the puzzle that we have been working on this past week.

It is a puzzling puzzle in that we finished it yesterday and there are four pieces left and four openings left -- but, the pieces do not fit exactly into those four places.

The pieces fit on some sides and not on the others and leave a gap -- we can see that they almost fit, but not quite.

We have not had this happen before. We have had missing pieces, but not pieces that do not fit . . .
I will send a note to the company and hopefully, they can advise us as to what has happened and also replace the non-fitting pieces with fitting pieces, that's all we ask.

Speaking of puzzles, a great segue way to genealogy, because genealogy is always potentially puzzling. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I have been exploring the Bumgardner branch a bit.

And I have mentioned that spelling is always an issue. As a result of the many ways that surnames are constantly being spelled in different ways, I often ignore the different spellings and look at the people and guess at why their name is spelled differently than I think it should be spelled.

It's "BUM" vs "BAUM"

With the Bumgardners, I usually stick with searching and looking at folks only using the "Bumgardner" way of spelling.


To the left, the two unnamed pictures on the bottom represent two folks that I started communicating with this past week.

Their comments and questions had to do with the parents shown above them.

I did not list a maiden name for the mother and they shared with me what that name was. They also passed over the spelling of their last name and attributed it to careless census takers and others.

I was beginning to think that I might not be related to these folks because of the Baumgardner spelling.

So, I started doing some investigation. I added a third generation -- the grandparents.

George Harry Baumgardner and his wife, Pauline. I looked up George's WWI draft card and VOILA -- it said, Bumgardner.

I then looked up his WWII draft card and guess what -- it said, Baumgardner -- with his signature as such.

Upon questioning the contacts, we were able to conclude that George had a real distaste for sometimes being called "Bummie" which was a common nickname for a Bumgardner. So some time in between WWI and WWII he changed the spelling of his birth surname to Baumgardner.

That spelling change meant that his descendants too would be Baumgardners, not Bumgardners.

Now, George Harry Baumgardner was the son of Marion Bumgardner, my 1st Cousin. Marion had several offspring and two changed their names to Baumgardner, the rest I believe kept Bumgardner.

Now, I realize that in Muscatine, Iowa and other locations, there are a lot of Baumgardners that are in fact cousins and for a strange reason they have a surname that is spelled differently -- not the result of careless record keepers -- though that does happen as well. And so it goes with the puzzle.

And lastly, the unfortunate marker for Will:

That was a bit of our week, we're trying to keep cool, see you all "in a few"!