Posts from — June 2008

And so we come to the half-way point. I ended up staying home with the kids due to some childcare issues.  Here they are having some fun in the sandbox.

This is my niece and my wife’s cousin relaxing in the backyard at my sister-in-laws

The amazing Chase Jarvis posted this video by Guy Ritchie as a nod toward point-of-view (POV) photography (he had a version off of YouTube, but this one seems of better quality). 

It especially hits home since my son and I have been playing FIFA World Cup 2006 on the XBox 360 every night this week (and keep getting handily beat by the computer – even stacking the deck by playing Brazil vs. Angola).

In case you’re wondering, the song in the video is “Don’t Speak (I Came To Make a Bang)” by Eagles of Death Metal.

There is a super high res version on Nike’s site.

UPDATE: Nike posted a longer version of the video earlier today.  Even better!

If you’ve ever driven between Milwaukee and Chicago, you know this sign.  It is a landmark on I-94. I’ve never actually been inside, but I’ve always wanted to make a photo of it.  I treated it with some cross processing and a fairly heavy vignette.

His haircut scored him the lollipop.

I was checking my electric/gas bill online today and got asked to participate in an online survey about the web site.  Question #25 made me wonder a bit:

Think about that one for a second.

My youngest enjoying a picnic dinner during his brother’s T-Ball game.  This shot works ok in B&W – this was a day where I don’t think I liked a single frame I shot.

It must be summer since there are constantly towels hanging over the fence around our pool.

It started innocently enough. 

Looking at my referral logs I saw someone found me via a Google France search for "Dysart." Anytime I see an inbound link like that I go look at the results. But not for the usual ego-surfing most people do.

I’m sort of a nut when it comes to my family name. It is uncommon enough that you don’t find it everyday, so when I do it’s sort of special. On the way back from my grandmother’s funeral in Northwestern Iowa, I drove almost an hour out of the way to go to Dysart, IA.  I have a t-shirt from Dysart’s Transportation, a trucking company in Bangor Maine as well as a cookbook from the truck stop that bears the same name. The only two "famous" Dysart’s I’ve come across are the actor Richard Dysart (who rose to fame in old westerns and later the TV show LA Law), and comic book writer, Joshua Dysart. I’ve never met either of them, nor am I probably related to them.

As far as the Google results, I think I was the fourth on the page (it wasn’t the first page), but two links above me were related to Dysart Castle near Kilkenny City in Ireland and the Dysart Music Festival near there there. Growing up, I’ve always been under the assumption that the Dysart name was Scottish, named for the small town of Dysart in Fife, Scottland.  This was probably through a Dysart family name book my parents got a long time ago through. This sort of put the possibility out there that the name could be Irish, which would have pleased my paternal grandmother to no end (her maiden name was Whalen and was 100% Irish heritage via family in New Brunswick Canada).

The whole thing got me interested in digging into the family name a bit more.  I sent an email to my Mom to see if she knew my paternal grandfather’s father name (there is a long story here, but I knew she’d know more readily than my father). Turns out his name was Royce Dysart and I got a Google hit on Ancestry.com for a census record of him living in Nicolet, MN (which I knew to be right).

That’s when I hit the pay-wall. Ancestry.com won’t cough-up the goods without a membership that costs about $12/mo when paid annually. Pretty steep for just a curiosity. So I left it at that, knowing I could find something if I really wanted to.

But it kept nagging me.

I saw Ancestry had a 14day trial and though what heck and signed up.  It didn’t take me long until I’d traced the family name via census records back six generations Joseph Dysart in Pensylvania who was born sometime around 1795.  That is where the trail goes cold.  Census records prior to 1840 only list the head of household’s name and number of people of certain ages.  There seem to be a lot of Joesph Dysarts (often spelled Dysert) from around that time that I cannot definitively tie to my family. Interesting enough is my lineage back to this point is all through first born sons.

Maybe with a bit more digging I can make some sort of connection, but still it was pretty crazy to go through the information Ancestry.com has.  The not only have digitized most government records related to genealogy, amost every record links back to a high-res scan of the original document.  Seeing the hand written census logs from 1840 listing my great-great-great-great grandfather’s house hold which included over $10k in land was pretty amazing to see (since in 1950, $10,199 would be a lot). I’m on the fence as to whether I’m going to cancel after the free trial – my wife got hooked and found a passenger manifest for one of her great grandparents, so there is definitely interest in flushing out the whole family tree.

Nonetheless, if you’ve read this far, thanks for humoring me, especially for my normal subscribers.  This post is squarely a post directed at Google in hopes of finding other Dysarts out there who share my weird obsession with the family name.  If you are or are not related to me and found this while looking up the name "Dysart", send me a quick message on the About page of the site. I’d love to hear from you.