#uh huh . exactly.

[egophiliac]

Hi it's just to let you know that the official romanization of Revaan's name is Raverne ! Also they have romanized Baul's name to Baur !

Twst coming back at us again with the least expected romanization! thank you everybody (oh god my inbox) (no it's great, I literally asked for this and the reactions have been INCREDIBLE, thank you all!)

I do like Raverne though, I think it's got a nice fancy sound to it! (I had kinda suspected it was going to be an R instead of an L, so the fact that it's SO close to Laverne except for that is hilarious to me personally.) and Dragoneye Duke is honestly probably the best translation for his title, I wasn't envying the localizers that one. :') Baur instead of Baul I was NOT expecting, but in retrospect I think his name's supposed to be a reference to the Bauru crocodile, so that actually makes way more sense!

someone else also said Meleanor has become Maleanor, which is the REALLY weird one to me, because I was so surprised it was written as Mel instead of Mal in the first place?! oh god no I can't decide which one I like better. 😭 (I wonder if they might change it to Mal...they have made romanization changes before) (like I remember House of Distraction being corrected to House of Destruction in Playful Land) (I did check and she's still Mel for now, but I dunno, they might Mal her up and some point and save me from having to make a decision about which one to use) (HECK I CAN'T DECIDE)

uhhhh thank you for letting me ramble about anime names, let's just say MONOGRAMMED SWEATERS FOR EVERYONE

[theminecraftbee]

"Well hello there Secret Keeper!" Scar says, chipper. "It's a bea-ut-i-ful day today here on the Secret Life server, and I'm here for my daily hearts for winning! I have to say, it is gorgeous today. Really a lot easier to keep the rain away without other players, what with sleeping through the night not being a problem at all! Did you know, by the way, that sleeping and rain are connected? I didn't until recently, but by golly, they sure are! Can you imagine? The world is full of so many strange things."

The Secret Keeper, being a big dumb stone statue, doesn't reply. Scar's beginning to think it's just rude. It sure replies whenever he hits the button, which is the first step in his morning routine these days. He's gotten better at dodging damage, really, even with the nearly infinite hearts! He's just not so good at dodging skeletons and creepers and such that he shouldn't top off every day.

He hits the button. He feels his health return to him. He gets a new task: Win Secret Life.

He snorts, a little bitter, to himself as he reads it and folds it into his pocket. "You know, I don't know if I'm lucky or unlucky that you're such a moron that you don't know what winning means. Your machine is broken."

No response, again, because the Secret Keeper is, as established, a big old dumb rock. Well, whatever. Besides, if he lingers on resentment and upset for too long, it might catch up with him! He's certainly let it catch up with him before. Why, a few days after he'd won, when he really had it sink in that he was for-real alone on a server covered in lightning burn marks and blood, he had a bit of a breakdown! There was sobbing, screaming, yelling at the world, the whole works! And when no one responded then, well--

"Did I just call you a moron? I'm sorry, I didn't mean that!" Scar says. "You know how I get sometimes. The world is beautiful and warm, but sometimes it gets a little hard to breathe around here! Now, where were we... oh, right! The trading post terraforming project! Now, we hit a bit of a snag the other day, what with the wandering traders I'd caught all sort of--dying--and all that, but luckily, more of them might show up any moment, and they really are vital to making the place feel alive and breathing. So today we're taking a break from that to build up some trees!"

He waves his arms like someone is listening. He'd like to imagine someone is. Grian told him he won--just because all the ghosts are quiet now doesn't mean they aren't there! And if that was a moment of temporary insanity, well, he probably--he needs to think it's not, is the thing! He absolutely needs to think it's not.

He hums and gathers more logs. His makeshift tree farms are pretty nice, if he does say so himself. He pauses as he hears distant howling and sighs. "I guess we will also be spending today cleaning up the wolf population! I swear, I have no idea what those people were thinking making a wolf spawner. A man takes a nap for a day and then the entire server is overrun with stupid white animals! And you know, I do hate having to cull the things, but, well, you know me. I've learned how to kill pretty well, I think, and really, dogs are easier to kill than people."

He grabs a sword from his chest and sharpens it. He keeps it perfectly clean so that there isn't too much blood on it. Good thing, too; most of the blood would probably be his. He's a bit clumsy, after all. He cuts his fingers on it all the time. No matter how well he bandages up his hands, he just keeps making them bleed, drip, drip, dripping blood on every path he walks down. No matter how hard he works to clean up his massive building projects, the little splatters of blood follow him, so he's sticking to dark colors where he can.

The flowers will probably show the blood, he thinks. The flowers and trees he's building. Hopefully, the blood doesn't stand out too much. It feels wrong, in a world where there are no bodies.

He stands up. He heads in the direction of today's pack of unwanted pests. He sighs. "You know, I know your question is, well gosh, Scar! All the previous winners died. When are you going to finish it off and kill yourself? And wow, that's a pretty dark question. You should be ashamed of yourself for asking, really." He laughs. It's not funny. Who cares.

Instead, he shakes his head.

"And, well, you have to understand. I'm not done building yet! I can make my base so much nicer looking! And besides, you're still handing me hearts. If I get hurt, I can just come back and get more from you! If you want to die, you have to kill me yourself. You fucking cowards!"

No response.

He sighs. "Well, that's enough of that for today. Sorry, I'm feeling kind of morose. It's all this sunshine! Can't be good for a man. Did you know populated servers rain more often than unpopulated ones? It's true! It's because people don't sleep enough. But here I am, getting all the sleep I need. Now, time to go kill some dogs and build some trees! I can't think of a better way to spend an afternoon, can you?"

His hands hurt. He ignores it. He ignores a lot of hurt, these days. It's not like it's hard.

[vigilskeep]

i’ve got to be real with cullen that everything he says about samson unfortunately makes himself seem worse and samson seem cooler

[coldlikethestars]

one thing about the withywoods years that drives me a little crazy is the fact that fitz is living that life as if he is a 80 year old retired man living his last years wanting nothing more than to spend time with his dear wife, completely ignoring the fact that he is a middle aged man who is not aging. not only he is still relatively young and could have been doing more with his life but he also pretends the not aging situation is simply Not Happening and he continues living in this little fantasy in which he will grow old and die by molly's side. and it was painfully obvious that he was going to outlive molly and continue his life without her but he simply never thinks about that. he never prepares himself for that loss and for a life beyond her even though, as painful as it is, that would have been the healthiest thing to do in that situation.

and all of this only adds to the fact that he was indeed living fully immersed in this fantasy and illusion of Absolute Normalcy that he created in his mind and he would not let anything else about himself and his life that was Not Normal to even touch that fantasy. but then he loses molly, the illusion crumbles, and the boredom and unfulfilling nature of that life becomes obvious. and, to me personally, it gets clear throughout the trilogy that that illusion he creates, his protectiveness of his life with molly and his inability of letting reality touch it, him cutting all these parts of himself and his life away, it's not only because he wants a life of normalcy and peace but because, above all else, he wants a life of being loved by molly. and he can't really see anything beyond that, the thought of not having that is unbearable, so he will continue to lie to himself, he will keep living an uneventful and unfulfilling life, he will pretend he's not really aging, he will lock all those parts of himself away in his little study, because that's what he thinks he has to do in order to have that life and feel loved by her.

and fitz thinks no one else loves him like that, and after he loses her, he thinks that no one else ever will. and to me the soul crushing tragedy of all this is that this comes almost directly from beloved's abandonment of him which not only reinforced his already existing abandonment issues, but also it meant being left behind and feeling used and unloved by the person he loved and wanted to be with the most.

[fastcardotmp3]

Nancy & Eddie; Nancy & Wayne; 1.4k; post-S1; the melancholy of Christmas; grief/mourning

That night, after Steve goes home and the leftovers are put away and the voices from Mike's walkie talkie murmur through the walls, Nancy creeps past the gleaming tree in the living room and out the front door.

The dark of the sky is gray with the potential for overnight snow and her layers of shirt and sweatshirt and coat and scarf and gloves keep the cold from permeating too quickly, but her cheeks pink over before she reaches the end of the cul-de-sac, let alone her destination.

She shouldn't be out this late. Her mother would hate it if she weren't wine drunk and sleepy enough not to notice, and there's not a good place for Nancy to do what she needs to do, but it's also not an optional thing.

It's not, to her.

There's no grave to visit at the cemetery, because Barb isn't dead to anyone else the way she is to Nancy, but she goes there anyway. Has been. Will continue to.

She's making do, in this and in so many other ways, and so she tries not to feel the utter not enough-ness of the little stack of stones she's built in a lopsided pyramid under a big oak tree with far-stretching branches right at the highest point of the cemetery.

She tries not to think about how she can't add Barb's name to this sham of a grave, can't even call it that when Barb's body is trapped somewhere she can never reach and thus can't bring home either.

Nancy just lowers herself to the cold, hard earth and goes about straightening the pile again, as she always does. She uses them as a barrier this time, a little fenced-in square to hold up the poinsettias she'd stolen from the centerpiece that had sat in the center of their Christmas dinner.

Her hands tremble. She lets them.

Her swallow grows thick. She lets it.

Her tears do not fall. They stay caught in her gut where the rest of her guilt resides, the rest of all her worthless searching, the rest of the hope she never got to mourn for fear of seeming ungrateful for the return of her brother's best friend.

Nancy sits here in front of her makeshift memorial and she does not cry, because there are no tears, and she does not speak, because there are no words, but her heart screams loud enough to shake the town apart.

Her soul wails and laments and begs. She lets it.

She lets it be loud enough that she doesn't hear the footsteps coming up behind her until there's the quiet clear of a throat and question of--

"Hate to bother you, kiddo, but can I bother you a moment?"

Nancy startles, both at the gentle gruffness of the self-contradictory question and the realization that her face is damp with the silent remnants of tears she cannot feel past the numbness of the cold.

"Sor-- Sorry?" she clears her throat as she stumbles quickly to her feet, brushing off her skirt and the thick tights beneath it as she does.

The man behind her isn't someone she knows, which would be a frightening thing if she were in any other mental state than this one, so doused in apathy for her own self that danger doesn't really register.

He wears a warm looking hunting jacket, a thick winter cap with flaps over the ears, and holds a thermos out in front of him.

"S'only, my boy spotted you out in the cold over here," he gestures to Nancy's left where she sees a boy she does recognize, the flit-away of his gaze back to a headstone at his feet all she gets out of Eddie Munson before his arms are crossing over his chest and his shoulders are hiking up around his ears. "Wondered if maybe you couldn't do with some company? Or just somethin' warm to drink?"

He holds the thermos up, this-- this person speaking for Eddie Munson when Nancy has never seen the guy be anything other than outspoken.

The sky is gray in its darkness, a muted sort of black that doesn't allow for stars beyond the heavy clouds.

There's a little pile of stones which are the only remembrance for a girl who deserved so much better than she ever got on the ground behind her.

"You want me to...?"

"We're visitin' his Mama," he says gently, and Nancy understands Eddie's posture better now, that distance away feeling shorter between them. "Anyone out here on Christmas oughtn't be alone, though, don't you think?"

"She didn't run away," Nancy blurts, the sudden need to explain overwhelming any of the kindness being offered to her.

He just nods. Succinct but not dismissive.

"Okay."

"She--" Nancy chokes. She can't tell if her cheeks are still wet. "She didn't run away."

She's not allowed to say it. She's not allowed to talk about it. She can't impart the seriousness of how much Barb didn't leave, didn't go, didn't get far enough away before her time ran out.

But this man, this Munson, he just takes a step closer with the suggestion of an offer with the slightest raise of his arm and Nancy is-- Nancy is hugging him.

She's leaning into the warmth of him, letting him wrap his arm across her shoulders and rub her back with a gloved hand because-- because no one, not a single person, none of them listen when she says it.

Not even the ones who know, not even the boy who loves her, not her own mother who cared more about the fact that Nancy lost her virginity than her best friend.

"I hear ya," he says in a quiet murmur and Nancy believes him. Can hardly breathe past the force of what it feels like to have the words she speaks land softly, with understanding.

"Sorry, sorry," she swipes at her face as she pulls away, and he lets her go without argument, but stays standing there. "Sorry, I know I look hysterical, I just."

A hitching breath. She doesn't hear these footsteps getting closer either, but she feels Eddie's presence in that familiar posture she has gotten to know too well since that first week in November.

She's about to enter a new year, a year with a new number and a new turn of the earth that Barb will never see.

"We're going for pie," Eddie says, even as Nancy wipes her face with the tail of her scarf like a child. "Diner off Walnut's open on Christmas. If you wanna come and be a fuckin' mope with me."

And there's something to it, this undeniable acceptance that Nancy is, in fact, facing the same sort of loss as a boy without a mother, that has her snorting with laughter.

There's something about them, the Munson's with their seeing of her in the most vulnerable state she's allowed herself to express outside the privacy of her shower, that feels like the same sort of relief as the release of pressure that comes along with laughter.

"Do you always pick up strays at the cemetery?" she asks with an attempt at humor, expecting the same dry witted sarcasm in response.

Instead she gets a softening.

Instead she gets this: "I was in band with her," with the lowering of a gaze to a pile of mismatched stones, only to raise back to meet Nancy's with intent, "she made me laugh."

Nancy's chin wobbles. Her lungs too tight in her chest.

She knows then, even before she says it and earns the drape of Eddie's arm around her narrow shoulders, that she'll go with them and eat pie with them and grieve with them.

They'll tell her about the woman they've lost and maybe Nancy will be able to choke out a sentence or two about the girl who raised her only for Nancy to fail her.

They'll eat and she will listen to them because she knows the importance of such a thing and it will hurt.

It will always hurt.

"You said something about pie?" she manages to get out with a hard sniff of her frozen nose.

There is a piece of her lost to a world locked off from the rest of them.

She wonders, tucked into the Munson's pickup truck on a journey in search of pie, whether maybe that's not such an isolated feeling as she thought.

[karda]

peace and love and wolves forever❤️

[samarecharm]

geniunely not trying to put words in ur mouth im geniunely asking: what do you actually like about persona 5? from all ur rants im just wondering why you didnt drop the game bc it seems (again, im not trying to put words in ur mouth) that it simply not for you? i geniunely have not felt any of the issues you bring up outside of the writing ones and i cannot tell if i'm just easily pleased and not good at discerning what a good game is or we simply have dif things we enjoy in a video game. i hate getting tone across text but im asking out of geniune curiosity im not trying to attack your opinion (;-;)

Nah, i dont feel like ur attacking me, and I hope u dont feel the same when u see my complaints! Lmao. In my defense, I am replaying the game for the first time after completing my first file back in 2020, so alot of the faults i kinda shrugged off in my first playthrough are now glaringly in my face now that I no longer have the confusion and interest in learning the main story to keep me occupied. The game is clunky all the way through, and at some times, even frustratingly so.

But despite that, i do like this game. Alot! Its probably one of my top games ever if im being honest!

This ended up way longer than I intended, so im putting it under a readmore to keep the post short on dashboards

If i had to describe what I liked about the game in the simplest way imaginable…I think I would say, I like how the game makes me feel :) I like the music. I like the vibe. I like the immersion from city to city, and I like the premise! I like the characters and I like the connections you make with these characters! As im replaying this game, i am most excited to see Akira and his comments about the world :) i like hearing everyones voices, I like their little interactions in Mementos, and I like seeing them fight!

P5 is the first game I played in the series; its the game that introduced me to SMT in the first place! And it (smt) is a series that my longtime best friend LOVES and never thought hed be able to share with me! It is a game i keep very near to my heart; it has influenced me in ways i did not think would happen in the short couple of years since i first finished it. It genuinely keeps me awake some nights thinking about the world this game has created, and I think that is a testament to the impact its had, be it good or bad.

The joke about wishing theyd make a persona game that was Good is that despite all of its numerous flaws, the games manage to snatch your attention and pull you in anyway. Imagine if they made a game that had all of those things that i mentioned I loved, but done Right and executed Properly?? Where I got to have a story that made sense and didnt need to be spoonfed to me (in like an HOUR of dialogue and scenes; an HOUR!), and characters that talked and bonded beyond the tiny snippets of interaction theyre allowed to have in mementos? Combat that let me use PERSONAS i liked instead of BUILDS that stop me from getting instakilled throughout the entirety of the endgame, and a Persona building mechanic that didnt feel like I was shooting in the dark looking for possible fusions that end up not even being useful in the endgame.

Ive mentioned it before, but I complain so much bc I have seen what a good p5 game looks like, and its Strikers almost to a T. Combat is still your typical warriors-esque style combat, but it is at least different from the turn based strategy of the main game. Characters talk to each other freely, they hang out and comfort each other in a way that feels more connected that the base game. Strikers implements the ability to see ALL possible fusions with ALL registered personas, not just the ones in your Stock, so you can fuse easily without having yo consult a guide. The story feels like it makes SENSE with antagonists that feel morally grey and sympathetic. Genuinely, alot of the complaints for p5 I had were almost immediately rectified in this game.

But please also know that the praises I sing for this game is only bc of the groundwork laid by p5 and the world it created. Thats what I like about this game, that it had such a captivating premise and cast of characters, that a DIFFERENT company was able to hit the ground running with them. P5 had alot happening in that game, but i think what it had most was potential. The effort put into this game is astronomical, and the possible connections you can outright MISS if u arent paying attention was worth the money and time to implement; even if it meant that it could be considered a waste of resources to higher ups.

Books and games and part time jobs???!! Silly little cutscenes that add nothing to the game PLOTwise, but define and flesh out the personality of your protagonist. There was alot of love put into this game, and its evident by the fact that we have NOT seen a new persona game released; they bank on existing titles bc they are unwilling to make a game like this from scratch again. They dont want to ‘waste’ resources on good voice acting and a complex, overarching story; they dont want to waste money on scenes a player may never see, on routes a player may never get to experience. Making a game that gives u even the slightest bit of freedom means more money in programming and detailing that freedom. This has been an issue for a WHILE, and its a miracle that the gaming landscape had space for a colossal title like p5!

I complain bc I want better, and I do not think that is inherently at odds with my love of this game. In b4 im told to get good; ive played on hard and tested out merciless (its NOT fun, im making godbuilds again and its boring 😞). Its not the most accessible turnbased rpg; theres no colorblind modes, and the affinity system is convoluted and overwhelming. Combo moves are hard to keep track of and it can be incredibly frustrating to see your turns being skipped or seeing characters take extreme technical damage without understanding WHY it happened. The fact that they KNEW the game was desperate for qol improvements by the time royal came out, and instead of updating the base game to have those improvements too, they just pushed the royal edition out for people to play instead. It sucks! Customers and fans deserve better than being forced to shell out money for a game they already played !

As the gaming climate gets more and more hostile and unbearable, I think it is good to look at your games critically, and understand why products come out subpar. Persona 5 is a fun game that has a nice cast and an interesting premise, but it is ultimately tied down by its refusal to build on existing building blocks regarding its combat, and it insists on having insulting and downright out of character dialogue and scenes to appease the audience its designed to be targeted to. It is easy to forget sometimes that queer ppl are infact NOT the prime target of these games, its cishet gamer bros from aged 16 to 40 who will laugh at homophobic comments, who drool over a 16 yr old girl with a 16 yr old mindset and a grown womans body, who need to be placated with constant sexual comments to deal with a convoluted story that will inevitably make zero sense until its laid out for you before the literal end of the game.

Its bad. Its good. Its so shallow and its unbelievable that they thought having the plot twist make ZERO sense until they showed CUTSCENES of YOUR character discussing Goro and his connections to the metaverse for endgame SHOCK VALUE was more important than just having your team be smart and piece it together over time. Its shit. Its literally amazing. It let you FUCK your teacher ??????????????what the FUCK. They also let me shoot a god in the face w the best looking ult persona in the world so i can ignore that shit. And ultimately that is how i got through the game. Lol.

[moeblob]

Karen: LMAO every guy I meet reminds me of my big brothers that's so funny except if Paul is already my brother and you're also a brother that's a bit awkward, huh Hot bartender: THATS MOVING REALLY FAST AND I LIKE YOU AS A PERSON BUT - Karen: having my brothers date would be SO WEIRD Hot bartender: Well on the bright side I literally cannot speak more than five words to him so we aren't dating because he's so cute

(Everyone else: that is somehow the most depressing bright side we never want to hear)

[etoilesombre]

Speaking of Flint replicating problematic imperial patterns in leadership when it suits him or he doesn't know what else to do: "Charles Vane, and the animals he commands, have until sunrise tomorrow to vacate that fort or, so help me God, I will rain holy hell down upon him."

[lyss-butterscotch]

When someone im supposed to care about repeatedly makes the most obvious dumb mistakes that takes effort to fack up, even after all the warnings ive told them.

Is it really a suprise when i stopped caring?

[telomirage]

"tuna as we know is pure" - friends at the table: palisade without context

[payidaresque]

MURAT YILDIRIM as Omer Atmaca Teskilat | 4x03

[skrunksthatwunk]

drugstore makeup run ends in tragedy: lip gloss looks really cool but tastes bad. like if they made cyborg vegetables

[eorzeashan]

I like how everyone wants D carnally, even his male enemies lol

[facefullofsadness]

what is aespa's best song and why is it still and always will be lucid dream FUCKKKKK WHY AM I SO ATTACHED TO YOU EVERYTIME YOU LEAVE ME IDK WHAT TO DO I JUST CANT STOP LOVING YOU IDK WHAT ELSE TO SAY YOU DRIVE ME CRAZY

[awheckery]

DEATH TW and mentions of murder so if that is triggering for you don’t read, but if it’s not then i’d like to ask if you’ve heard of forensic genealogy? while i am uneasy at the prospect of using it to find suspects, it can also be used to find the identities of unidentified decedents, who die of accidental causes or are murdered, and often it’s the only hope to identify those who have been unidentified for decades. the dna doe project is a nonprofit that’s mostly volunteer run, and i think that your research skills could be useful there or somewhere like there. i know this is kind of a random ask to receive, identification of unidentified remains is my special interest but i don’t have the time or training to get better at researching beyond a few tricks here and there.

I feel like we've read the same articles recently; did you see the tumblr post (and linked articles) about Joseph Augustus Zarelli, the Boy in the Box?

Which is to say, yes, I am aware of forensic genealogy and the DNA Doe Project, because like many white American women, I'm a true crime junkie.* My big Thing is investigative procedure tho, so I'm also deeply interested in plane & train crash investigations, medical mysteries, archaeology, anthropology... basically 'what happened, and by which processes and methods do we figure out what happened?'

So far as getting into the game myself, I dunno. I assume there's probably some sort of required formal training, along with the expectation of reliability and sustained effort, and I'm a chronically ill autodidact with ADHD. I'm the research equivalent of a sprinter; investigative genealogy requires a marathoner, because there's so much exhausting, grinding work involved.

Something I've never seen brought up before in any investigation is how many extant family trees are just wrong. Genealogical sites make it too easy to crib notes from other users, and all it takes is one person deciding 'eh that's probably the right guy' for dozens of other amateur researchers to make the same mistake, and then somebody ties that erroneous information to their DNA profile. I don't know how the forensic genealogists deal with that.

You also have to take into account how many people throughout history have just gone missing, or otherwise fallen off the historical record. Just because someone's date of death is absent doesn't mean something nefarious happened to them. (Just because someone's date of death is present doesn't mean it's correct.) People emigrate. They marry. They change their names. They die alone and unknown in a ditch**, or they die somewhere that doesn't make those records public***. Paper records can burn or flood out, and family stories rarely make it down more than one or two generations. History is messy.

I've only done serious research into my family background for two years, in fits and starts interrupted by illness flare ups. Half the time it feels like I find more questions to ask than I get answers. I've found a pair of illegitimate daughters and a handful of adoptees. I've found some two dozen 'missing persons' who may as well have disappeared into thin air, for how suddenly they dropped out of the historical record. I've found a murder victim and a (maybe) would-be murderess.

And four months ago, I found the answer to another family's 150 year old missing person case, and it changed everything I thought I knew about my mother's family.

This is how.

Five months ago, I thought I knew everything there was that could be known about John Robert McDowell.

I knew he was born July 1st of either 1868 or 1869, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. According to his naturalization petition, he came to the United States in April of 1883, when the absolute oldest he could have been was fourteen, and at the time of his naturalization in 1896 he claimed his nationality was English, presumably due to anti-Irish sentiments at the time.

I knew John's handwriting was idiosyncratic: he wrote the J in his name with a rightward upper loop that scooped up again before curving back around the center staff, and his uppercase R was a mess of curlicues. I've never seen the like before or since.

I knew that despite living in America for ten years longer than he'd lived outside it, John still had an accent in 1908 when his second son was born. Spelling is incredibly inconsistent across historical records because up until very recently, it was the practice of the record keepers to write down their best guess at what they heard, and in 1908 a midwife heard and recorded John's surname as McDoul.

John's life was actually remarkably well-documented, in comparison to his contemporaries. I bought myself access to Newspapers.com along with my Ancestry subscription, and he made semi-regular appearances in the Newport News Daily Press for the better part of thirty years as a Navy veteran, successful entrepreneur, and president of a labor union that later became the United Steelworkers Local 8888. (A seemingly throwaway notice in the Daily Press was the only record I've yet been able to find for his divorce, which eventually led me to find out whatever happened to his wife, which is another saga entirely. Pauline, you dirty rotten cheater.)

I knew that John was in and out of the hospital with thyroid cancer, but he was such a tough old bastard it took the better part of fifteen years to kill him, and he died in 1954 at the age of 86.****

According to John's death certificate (and the U.S. Government records at the VA hospital where he died), his parents' names were Thomas McDowell and Isabell Rabb (or possibly Robb, the Accent strikes again.)

This is the only record linked to either of them on Ancestry.com at all.

I have most of a history degree, so I wasn't surprised. There are next to no records of the 1890 census of the United States, and that was down to a fire in the National Archives. Ireland was dragged backwards through hell by the ankles for centuries by a succession of British monarchs and governments, and Belfast was in the prime of especially conflicted territory for much of it. No census records from John's lifetime were kept, and the likelihood his parents would show up in the surviving fragments from 1841 and 1851 was slim to none.

There were transcribed indexes from birth and marriage records available, at least, and I scoured them through, looking for a John McDowell, and there wasn't a single damn one born to a Thomas or Isabelle McDowell in a decade on either side of 1868. There wasn't any record I could find at all of a Thomas McDowell marrying an Isabelle Rabb until well after John left Ireland.

Five months ago, as far as I knew, John Robert McDowell was probably a bastard, who'd either been left out of whatever records were taken at the time, or he was one of the unfortunate ones whose birth record had been lost.

Four months ago, I realized that the record indexes on Ancestry included film numbers, which meant there were pictures of those records to be found somewhere. If they were organized chronologically, I could try to find his birth registration that way. Googling "ireland civil registration records" brought me to the Civil Records search page of a genealogy site run by, of all things, the Irish government's tourism department.

Once again, there wasn't a John McDowell born to the right parents during the right time period, so I went looking for his parents' marriage. And found it.

If they married in 1872, John would probably still technically be a bastard, but I had a point to start from. Once I clicked into the actual scan of the record I nearly snapped myself in half sitting upright in attention, because Thomas McDowell's father's name was Duncan, John named his eldest son Duncan, Isabella's father's name was John, I had to have the right two people, this couldn't be a coincidence.

And then I noticed Isabella was a widow. Isabella was a widow.

Who was your husband, and when did he die, Isabella? I searched again, and found her marriage to a Thomas Logan July 30th, 1866. No men named Thomas Logan died in Belfast between 1866 and 1870, which meant he was probably still alive when John was born. It meant I had been looking in the wrong direction the entire time.

John Robb Logan came into the world on July 1st, 1868, in the Ballymacarrett district of Belfast, the second child of four born to Thomas Logan and Isabella Robb. Once I knew what I was looking for the rest came easy.

John's early life was riddled with tragedies. His younger brother Joseph was six months old when he died in March of 1870. His father died of smallpox in December of the same year, exactly one month after the birth of his sister Mary. Three months before his fifth birthday, his first half-sibling Bella died, at just five months old. And in 1879, his older brother William died after a long, miserably drawn-out illness from spinal tuberculosis.

(As an aside, god, poor Isabella. She had four children with Thomas Logan, and a further nine with Thomas McDowell, and before her early death from a long respiratory illness she buried a husband, two sons, and two daughters. How do you go on after that, how are you not forever shattered?)

If I hadn't been sure I'd found the right family, I was after William died. Thomas McDowell was the person who reported William's death to the registrar's office after sitting by his deathbed. The registrar recorded William as a "child of [the] baker" that Thomas was by profession; Thomas McDowell claimed his stepson as his own.

Duncan McDowell, John's step-grandfather, had a family burial plot in Ballygowan, and he named William Adam Logan as his grandson, with no qualifiers, when they buried him.

All the evidence suggests that the McDowells loved John Robb Logan and his siblings, and he loved them back every bit as much. You don't choose to take on the surname of people you hate, and it seems very much the case that John chose to go by McDowell when he came to America. I'm honestly not sure there was a way for Thomas McDowell to bequeath his name to his stepchildren, given John's brother William died a Logan and his sister Mary married as one.

John Robb Logan disappeared from history after his baptism, and John Robert McDowell made his first confirmed appearance in the historical record in 1883, but I was certain they were one and the same. The problem was proving it to my mother, because McDowell was her family name. She'd grown up with it, as had her sisters and her dozens of cousins and her father and his siblings and her father's father; I only had a paper trail arguing the name she knew didn't belong to any of them by blood.

So I went for blood.

I refuse to give my DNA to Ancestry.com on a principle born from paranoia and ethics concerns. It's absolutely not happening, ever, like hell do I expect a corporation to do the right thing with my genetic material. My mother doesn't share my concerns, either now or four years ago, when she bought an Ancestry DNA kit and then did absolutely nothing with her results besides marvel at the unexpected Swedish heritage in her 'Ethnicity Estimate' because doing anything else looked like too much work.

It took a few days to figure out how to hook my mother's DNA results into the tree I've built, and a few more for all the features to populate, but all told it took less than a week between learning the truth about my great-great-grandfather's parentage and proving it irrefutably with DNA, via several descendants of his full-blooded sister Mary and a grandson of his half-brother Wallace.

Ancestry doesn't tell you when new DNA matches are found, or when someone adds you to their tree (and thank god for that, my mother has somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand matches). To those descendants of Mary Thomasina Logan, the handful of John's descendants who've shelled out for Ancestry DNA kits could be any random person. Frequently the relationships between matches aren't clear, because of all the folks like my mom who never add a tree to their results, or those who don't try to go any further back than their grandparents.

As far as Mary Logan's descendants know, the sons of Thomas Logan dead-ended his line, and when I do find John in their trees there's never more than a birth year and a blank space where there would usually be a year of death. (They all have the wrong Isabella Robb too, but I don't really blame them; apparently Isabella was one of the most popular names for girls for well over a century, and Robbs weren't exactly thin on the ground.)

Someday soon, I'm going to reach out. People who study genealogy do it because they're looking for something: long lost relatives, answers to questions asked too late, or even a better, more personal understanding of history by learning about the people who were there when it happened. Every family has its mysteries and this one, at least, could be solved.

John's story doesn't end here. Here is where it begins.

~

*I'm aware of the problematic nature of White Lady True Crime Brain Poisoning, but I'm gonna have to pull the 'I'm not like other girls' card. I'm incredibly discerning about my crime shows, I hate the fucking cops, and I'm realistic about how unbelievably low my chances are of ever being the victim of a violent crime. I'm white, I'm broke as shit, I'm built like a running back and walk like the Terminator, and most importantly, I'm single and planning to stay that way for the rest of my life. The only way I'm getting murdered is if I happen to get caught in a random mass shooting, which isn't outside the realm of possibility because America.

**In case anyone's gotten this far and is still interested, there's strong evidence that the mystery of the Somerton Man was finally solved last year. At some point I'd like to take a look at the tree the forensic genealogists built tho, because I have some Doubts. There was only one person in that family that fell off the map in the 40's? Just one? I was lightning-strike kinds of lucky enough to find John's real parentage, but I dug up more unanswered questions with it, because two of his half-brothers dropped out of the records after 1901. Completely setting aside the possibility of infidelity in the Webb family and how common inbreeding has been (both historically and in recent memory) in populations of European descent, I have a hard time buying that Carl Webb was the only person who could be the Somerton Man. It's still cool as shit that they have a strong possibility tho.

***Maryland and Kansas specifically can blow me, if somebody died in either of those states I have to find an obituary or a tombstone to get the mcfrickin' date, and I have to either pay money and prove a relationship to see a death certificate, or show up to an archive in person to search on their intranet, MARYLAND WHY DO YOU NOT WANT ME TO KNOW WHEN MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER DIED. (Being fair, I don't know if she died in Maryland, that's just a great-uncle's best guess, because she ran away from her family in 1949 and nobody ever saw her again after the early 60's. Helen, where the hell did you go?)

****One of the big reasons why I got into genealogy in the first place was to see if I could find how far back the predisposition to early deaths and autoimmune disease went in my family. What I hadn't expected to find was a predisposition for extreme longevity on all sides. Longevity as in 'skewing the life expectancy bell curve' kinds of longevity. As long as someone didn't come down with a freak illness or make a looooooooong string of poor life choices, they were apparently immune to death, which honestly explains a few things about Crazy Grandma, god damn.