Snohomish Interlude

Rumors abound that the blogger fell into a Blog Hole, something like a black hole, and equally difficult to explain. Actually, I've been roaming the Pacific Northwest -- specifically the area from Seattle, north to Mt. Baker, east through North Cascades National Park, and south to Wenatchee on the Columbia. I have not seen Sasquatch, but have seen a wingless Boeing 737 fuselage on a flatbed rail car in Wenatchee on its way to the the Boeing assembly plant at Everett.

Genealogy is to blame for this trip.  The trip began with two fantastic days at the Northwest Genealogy Conference in Arlington, Washington. This is the third annual conference put on by the Stillaguamish Valley Genealogical Society. The headliners were Blaine Bettinger and Lisa Louise Cook. What a treat! There was an outstanding complement of other speakers, but I didn't get to hear them because I was busy giving four presentations myself.

After the conference closed on Saturday, I did attempt a small genealogy excursion. My wife's grandmother's sister drifted from Minnesota to Snohomish County, Washington. I don't know much about her life, but she died in Snohomish County in 1969.  From Findagrave.com, I knew that she was buried in the G.A.R. Cemetery just outside the town of Snohomish. Thinking a G.A.R. cemetery in Washington was probably a small, walkable cemetery, I expected to easily find the grave. But, the cemetery was much larger than expected and it was a hot dry day. The grass burned to a crisp. The sun glared off the flat grave markers. The sections were not visibly numbered. The office was closed. There was no cemetery map. I did not find Kate Jackson or her husband, Samuel.

Monday took us north to Lynden, an area where Dutch immigrants first arrived in the late 1800s. Some Dutch folk from Siouxland (NW Iowa and adjoining parts of Minnesota and South Dakota) sought greener pastures in Whatcom County in the early 1900s. Among them was John Zylstra and his wife, Marie Zorgdrager. Marie was my Dad's cousin. I have misty memories of visiting their farm east of Lynden, near Sumas, in 1962 -- a trip centered on the Seattle World's Fair. John and Marie had five children, the youngest of them twin daughters who were just a year older than me. It dawns on me now that they were 2nd cousins!

I know nothing of what happened to the twins, but John died in 1990 and Marie in 1993. They are buried in a small cemetery at Nooksack, in the shadow of the Cascades. This gravestone I found.

I paid my respects -- although I'm not sure what that phrase means. I think it means I remembered them, however vaguely. I did not know them well, but they were important relatives to my Dad. I would like to find out what happened to the twins.

Mr. Tudball, I mean Tidball

I have no idea how the writers for the Carol Burnett Show (1967-78) came up with the name Tudball for the character played so hilariously by Tim Conway. Mr. Tudball was a small businessman trying to run an efficient office with the help of his clueless secretary, Mrs. Wiggins (Carol Burnett).

In about the middle of the run of this classic comedy TV show, I married Ms. Tidball -- not Tudball, but close. The hilarious Mr. Tudball skits were aired sometime between 1975 and 1978. We watched the show every week, so you would think that the similarity of the two names would have struck me or her. As best as we can remember, we never thought anything of it. But, you see, this was nearly 15 years before I knew genealogy even existed.

We (my wife and I) knew the Tidball family came from England in the 1880s, but not much more. Back in those days (a distant past known as the 1990s), one of the best sources for genealogy research was the International Genealogical Index -- on microfiche. There, in the IGI, was the name Tidball, predominately in Somerset in Southwest England. As I followed these leads, I soon discovered the Tudball name in some of the same parishes. Fairly obviously, Tidball and Tudball are variants of the  same name. A modern topographic map shows Tudball’s Splats, a set of enclosed fields about 2 miles southwest of Withypool in what is now Exmoor National Park. No one knows how long this place has carried the Tudball name, but the Tudball spelling probably dates from the 1500s or 1600s.

My father-in-law's family history notes suggested the family came from Wales and vaguely suggested that the name Tidball referred to the keeper of something called the tide ball. Such a thing does, or did, exist. It was a ball that was raised to tell ship captains when the tide was high enough for a ship to safely enter a harbor. Presumably, harbors did have tide ball-keepers. The Somerset Tidballs lived within 25 miles of the sea, and at least one Tidball family settled on the Welsh coast, but no evidence has been found to suggest the family name has anything to do with tide balls.

As future posts will explain, my wife's Tidball family traces back to a Thomas Tidboald -- another variation of the name. Other names, including Tidbald, Tedball, Tudbold, and Tudboll are likely also variants of the same name. Several surname dictionaries state that these names derived from the Germanic name Theobald, possibly arriving from northeastern France after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.One source says the name Tidball is of early medieval French origin, commonly occurring as Tebald or Tibalt (old French Teoband and Tibaut), all deriving from Theobald – derived from Germanic roots -- “theudo” meaning “people,” and “bald,” meaning bold or brave.

According to a Wikipedia article, Tim Conway's Mr. Tudball character was widely thought to be Swedish, but Conway said he used his mother's Romanian accent. Obviously, the comedy writers thought the name might be good for a few laughs, and they might even have thought they had come up with a nonsense name that could not possibly offend anyone. Now, we can set the record straight: Tudball (and the variant Tidball) is a perfectly good English name -- and, I doubt anyone was seriously offended.

Don't Know Much about Philosophy

Don't know much about philosophy. Wow... now, I have the tune from Sam Cooke's 1960 "Wonderful World" song (You can look it up) stuck in my head.

But, today I am risking thinking about philosophy because, on my flight home from SCGS Jamboree, I read Stephen Hatton's article about philosophy and genealogy in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly ("Thinking Philosophically About Genealogy," NGSQ, March 2016, 5-18).

Hatton argues that philosophy can do five things for genealogy:

• Deepen understanding of genealogy and its key concepts and presuppositions,
• Support genealogy's theoretical grounding,
• Produce a more firm foundation for the Genealogical Proof Standard GPS),
• Increase appreciation of research challenges and common errors, and
• Improve relations with other disciplines, which might improve genealogy's standing in academia.

 Like I said, I don't know much about philosophy, but it does seems pretty important to me. Wikipedia tells me that classic philosophical questions include those of whether it is possible to know anything, or to prove its existence. As a genealogist, that sounds like a pretty core question to me. In fact, I often open genealogy lectures with a slide simply asking HDYKWYTYK? -- How do you know what you think you know?

Hatton's article explores the ontology of genealogy. "Ontology" is not I word I feel very comfortable with, but I understand it to mean something about the study of the nature of things that exist -- and therefore can be talked about and studied. Hatton suggests three ontological views of the human subjects (mostly dead) that genealogists study. They can be a "substance" with properties, a "lived being" with passions, or an entity (person) shaped by events. What I get out of the ensuing discussion is that people can be thought of as objects that have qualities, stand in relationship to each other, and both affect and are affected by events. This is a very generalized summary that very possibly does not do justice to Hatton's discussion. You need to read the article for yourself.

Hatton states that practitioners of genealogy and philosophy have yet to interact. That is probably mostly true, especially in the higher altitudes of academe. Yet, I would argue that genealogists who have contributed to the GPS and accompanying standards have done a good deal of philosophical thinking. In fact, I have known many genealogists who seem capable of thinking philosophically about genealogy without being in the same room with a philosopher. Hatton also contends that genealogy "has not sufficiently provided its own theoretical grounding," adding that "Ground refers to what is fundamental, from which other things derive and are understood, explained, and built" (p. 8). Again, I am certain genealogy can do better, but I do think we have made significant progress.

When Craig Scott and the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy issued a call for colloquium papers that would "advance the theory of genealogy," I stuck my neck and and submitted a paper that discussed genealogical education, evidence-based genealogy, and genealogy's place in the "knowledge world." I suggested that an important step toward making genealogy a credible discipline was to define core concepts. I suggested six: maternity and paternity, lineage, ancestry, kinship, heritage, and biography.
I don't think I said much that others hadn't already thought, but if you are interested in these kinds of ideas and the kinds of question that Hatton raises, you might want to check out my article ---"The GPS and Beyond: Challenges for a Genealogy Profession," Crossroads, Spring 2015, 18-25).

I am certain that other genealogists around the world are having lively discussions about the philosophy of genealogy, but I don't hear a lot about those discussions from where I sit. I hope those discussions continue and grow.

I don't think I have a lot more to say about this topic, so I might not return to it in this blog any time soon. Rather, I am thinking I will start in on the Tidball family saga -- which puts me in mind of Tim Conway's Mr. Tudball character on the Carol Burnett show! O.K., that should get "Wonderful World" out of my head.

Jamboree Withdrawal

If you've ever attended a lively genealogy conference, you'll understand how the post-conference effect. After two or three days of info-packed and provocative (in a good way) presentations, the genealogy center in your brain feels fully caffeinated. You have more ideas for research (and analysis) than you can handle -- or at least enough to last you until the next conference. You also have come home with new friends and enriched old friendships. And, if you spent a half-day in Hollywood, you also might suffer a bit from culture shock when you get home.

That pretty much describes how I feel after being home less than 12 hours from the Southern California Genealogical Society's 2016 Jamboree.  "Jamboree" is a good word for this event -- it has a sort of festival feeling to it. My three presentations went well (I hate to think of them as lectures), and I enjoyed good company.

My presentations were infused with many Fawkner family stories, including the mystery of why Katharyn Fawkner, who lived most of her adult life in the Los Angeles area and never lived east of Indianapolis, was buried in New York City. This new "Why THERE?" presentation is already one of my favorites. This week's regular Thursday Blogsday blog will tell Katharyn's story. Stay tuned.

My favorite question -- "Why There?"

How many times have you heard a curious child ask, "Why?"  I'm afraid I've lost a bit of my innocent childhood curiosity, but in my dotage, my favorite family history question is "Why There?"

We genealogists spend a lot of time on who (names), what (births, marriages, and deaths), when (dates) and where (location). Our databases are full of who, what, when, and where. Those databases don't usually have a place for "Why?" I'm especially interested in migration and the geography of family history. I always wonder: why did they settle there?

• Why did Johan Månson settle in Iowa? (see November 2015 post)
• Why did Sipke Zorgdrager immigrate to Stephenson County, Illinois (see March 3, 2016 post)
• Why did James Fawkner take his young family to Fort Madison, Iowa? (see June 4, 2015 post)

I think this question so enriches family history research that I developing a new lecture titled "Why Were They There" for presentation at the Southern California Genealogical Society's Jamboree in June (http://genealogyjamboree.com/) and the Northwest Genealogy Conference in Arlington, Washington, in August (http://stillygen.org/cpage.php?pt=50).

Probably the two most obvious reasons for an ancestor settling there are livelihood opportunities or friends or relatives who preceded them. Chain migration is classic. One satisfied immigrant from a family, or even an entire village, often became a magnet for many more to follow. The result, especially in the western Midwest and Great Plains, is a map dotted with hundreds of urban neighborhoods and small towns with strong ethnic identities that persist a hundred or more years later.

I am still unsettled about just which case studies I will use in my lecture. Johan Månson, Sipke Zorgdrager, and James Fawkner are all candidates. But, I'm also thinking about why, only a week after his marriage in Bristol, England, John Tidball took his wife to a southern Minnesota farm in 1884. I'm also wondering why a Italian teenager landed in a small town on the North Shore of Lake Superior. And why, my young German great-grandfather went directly to southeast Iowa in 1866.

Perhaps my favorite "why there" story involves a casket. Katharyn Fawkner did in Los Angeles in 1954. The story of how she got from Minnesota to California, which an in-between stop in  Chicago, is a good one. But this is the story about her life after death. You see, her California death certificate stated that burial was in Woodland Cemetery in New York City. Why there? The answer involves a cousin who married into wealth. The story is a bit too involved to tell this week, but if Katharyn's spirit moves me, I might tell it next week. This, of course, also could by my segue way back to the Fawkner family -- a family about which there is so much more to share.

Haven't Lost My Mind... Found it... The Photo, I Mean

A few weeks ago (January 28), I wrote about how I discovered that Kate Zorgdrager's given name was Tryntje. The entire time I was working on that blog post, I thought I was losing my mind. In my minds eye I could see a colorful certificate, complete with bluebirds and colorful flowers, documenting the marriage of Kate Zorgdrager and John Fonkert. I knew I had a photo of it, but after searching high and low, through photo albums and boxes, I could not find it.

Well, I just found it last night!

This scan is from a 3.5" x 5" print, which tells you something about how many years ago I took the photo -- sometime in the 1980s before I even knew genealogy existed. It also means I should have a color negative or transparency (slide) of it somewhere.

Why just a negative or transparency?  You see, I am quite certain I do not have the certificate itself.  As I recall, my Dad had borrowed some old family photos -- and, I think, also the marriage certificate -- from my Dutch aunt. I laid them out on the floor of the garage and photographed them. My memory says that they all then went back to my aunt (died 1902), and despite queries to her children, never saw the again.

So much family memorabilia is lost between generations. Thankfully, I took photos of this certificate.

Eat Turkey, Give GenThanks

This blog usually comes on on Thursdays. Thanksgiving always falls on a Thursday. What is a blogger to do?

Get the blog out early so that the Fonkert and Tidball families can read it before traveling over the river and through the woods to wherever they might be headed.

What is a genealogist to do on Thanksgiving? Eat turkey. Maybe watch some football (although the game that really matters is Friday). Give GenThanks.

Genealogists are thankful for all the usual things -- family and friends, good crops, plenty of food on the table, a roof overhead, beautiful land, and  the luxury of living in a civil society, to name a few. But, this is a genealogy blog, and genealogists give GenThanks for all the things ancestors have passed forward across time to us. Things like:

• Names -- what is your favorite ancestral name?
• Memories -- what story do you like most to re-tell?
• Traditions -- what is your favorite holiday meal?
• Recipes - Which side of the family does the scalloped corn recipe come from?

And, then there are genes -- those wonderful, hard-to-imagine sequences of nucleotides that chromosomes pass forward across generations. Genealogist give GenThanks for genes. I'm not going to wax eloquent, or wax at all, about DNA. But, on this Thanksgiving, I want to give brief mention to the four sets of great-grandparents that helped make our two daughters who they are. They are the eight individuals in places 8-15 on our daughters' ahnentafel charts.

Jan (John) Fonkert (8) and Trijntje (Kate) Zorgdrager (9). This set of great-grandparents make our daughters one-quarter Dutch, but Jan and Kate were American-born. Jan Fonkert's parents came from Zuid Holland -- his mother in 1848, his father in 1870. Kate's parents were born on Terschelling, a barrier island in the North Sea off the coast of Friesland.

Johan Emmanuel Månsson (Hanson in America) (10) and Edith Romkee (11). A 19-year-old who had lost an eye in a farm accident, came from Hyssna, Sweden, to Tingley, Iowa, in 1908. (Previous blogposts tell some of his story). Edith, or Eda, was born in Tingley to German parents -- Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Römbke and Cahta Gerloff. Yes, Römbke was Anglicized to Romkee or Romkey. The Römbkes came to southeast Iowa from Windheim on the Weser River. Cahta Gerloff, 17 and single, landed at New Orleans in 1846; her parents and birthplace are not known -- yet.

Aubrey Tidball (12) and Carrie Ehlenbach (13). Aubrey was born in Steele County, Minnesota, to John Tidball and Mary Ann Lee, who had emigrated from Bristol, England, just days after their marriage. Born at Arcola, Illinois, Carrie was a daughter of James Frank Ehlenbach and Elizabeth Ann Fawkner. Yes those Fawkners, the Fawkners I have spent much of the past six months blogging about. I'll be getting back to them soon.

 
Carl Ferdinand (Charles) Falk (14) and Barbra Kolberg (15). Swedish Charles Falk married Norwegian Barbra Kolberg in Two Harbors, Minnesota in 1919. Charles was one of 10 children born to a family that emigrated about 1890 from the parish of Drev in Småland. Barbra was born at Drøbak, south of Oslo. Barbra's mother, Anna Marie Morstad, brought five children to America in 1906 after her husband, Marthin Kolberg died. There are stories in the Morstad family to rival the Fawkners; perhaps I will eventually get around to telling some of them.

If my math is correct, this all adds up to my American daughters' heritage being one-fourth Dutch, one-fourth Swedish, one-fourth German (with a little Danish mixed in), one-eighth Norwegian, and one-eighth English (with some Irish and Welsh behind the scene). It's not the most exotic heritage, but it is what it is.

But, here's the thing with those genes: because father's and mother's DNA recombine every generation, not all ancestors' genes get passed down equally. Thus, these heritage fractions are not precise. The Swedish might have won out over the German. Let's just say this is a plain old Northern European heritage.

I leave you with one thought: Ancestors are not optional. We are here because they were. For better or worse.

Monty Python is not my Ancestor

As they used to say on Monty Python's Flying Circus,* "And now for something completely different."

A handful of you might have noticed that this blog went AWOL a few weeks ago. The author went car-tripping across the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, where he communed with bison, geysers, and granddaughters. He was in no position to do any serious blogging.

Before he hit the road, your blogger had spent five months working through the Fawkner family. He still has a long way to go. Some of greatest Fawkner foibles and tragedies are yet to come, but intrepid as he is, the blogger is simply not ready to tell some of the remaining stories the way they ought to be told.

For a mental break and to buy some time to figure out how to proceed with the Fawkners, the blogger plans to wander through some lighter Fonkert and Tidball family heritage stories over the next several weeks. This Thursday, he will tell how a 1910s postmark led to a photo album in Sweden with a 1950s photo of the blogger and his brother on the first page of his Swedish mother's photo album. The following week he will tell how, on the same trip, he met a 9th cousin in The Netherlands.

If you are exclusively a Fawkner follower, you might want to tune out for a while.  But, if you simply enjoy stories of family history discoveries, the blogger invites you to stay tuned over the next month or so while he comes to grips with the Fawkners.

* If you know about about the Flying Circus and things completely different, you are probably over 50.

The Summer Genealogy Season

Here in the Northland, our summer days are long, but our summers are short. Our big Genealogy Season is winter, when the days are short and the cold snaps are long. There just isn't enough time for genealogy. People tend their gardens and send the kids to camp in the summer.

But, hey, genealogists need summer camp, too. Some of you will be heading to Birmingham in about a week for the ultimate genealogy summer camp at Samford. It's too late to sign up for IGHR, but there still might be a few spots open at the new GRIP institute in Pittsburgh.  I'll let others who know more about GRIP pitch it, but I want to remind you of a couple of other great summer time genealogy opportunities.

At the top (or the front) of the list is the Southern California Genealogy Jamboree next week in Burbank. I will be attending for the first time, and am excited to be offering three lectures. I'll be talking about finding Grandpa's land on maps, tricks to finding pre-1850 ancestors, and testing the veracity of family lore. I am having a great time preparing the family lore talk. Using the case of John Fawkner's three previously unknown wives, I will be showing how family lore can be partially true, exaggerated or incomplete. If you haven't already registered, get yourself to the Jamboree website (http://www.scgsgenealogy.com/Jamboree/2012jam-home.htm).

Next on my agenda is the 2013 Federation of Genealogical Society conferences in Birmingham in August. So you can't get to IGHR? You can still do some genealogy in Birmingham. I will be presenting a version of the Fawkner story there, plus offering a Society Day talk on defining mission and standards for society journals. Learn more at http://www.fgs.org/2012conference/.

The most urgent beginning of summer news is this: Registration opens Saturday, June 2, for next January's Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy. I will be there leading a case study exercise in Course 10 -- the genealogy practicum course coordinated by Angela McGhie and Kimberly Powell. This course opened to rave reviews last January. The other instructors for the 2013 are Tom Jones, J. Mark Lowe, Stefani Evans and William Litchman. But, there's more. Yes, there are 10 other courses to choose from. And, if you get your homework done early, you can hang out in the Family History Library two blocks away.  Afterall, it will be January -- a great time of year for some indoors genealogy exercise.

Genealogy as a Conversation-starter

As we pulled away from Gate G15 at MSP, I pulled out my copy of Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity and Community by Eviatar Zerubavel. Some of you might recall that it created a bit of a stir in the genealogy community when it was published earlier this year. The middle-aged businessman in seat 35A looked over and said, "That looks interesting." I said, "Yes," and explained that I was a genealogist. He actually knew what genealogy is. He proceeded to tell me that he had traced his Visser family back to the area of Sneek in Friesland. How interesting, I thought, and told him that I was flying to Yakima to give a couple of talks on Dutch and Fries genealogy. He thought that was pretty cool. He said he was flying home -- he had grown up in Whatcom County, Washington. "Oh," I said. "I know where that is. I've got some Dutch-Frisian relatives in Whatcom County. But, I couldn't remember the name. I started going through the alphabet, starting with "A," trying to think of familiar Dutch-Frisian surnames starting with each letter in hopes of recalling the forgotten name. When I got to "Z," it hit me: Zylstra. "Zylstra!" he said. "I went to school with some Zylstras." Well, that's cool, I thought. I started to remember more. "I think my Dad's cousin had twins," I said. The guy in 35C says, "I had a friend named Peter Zylstra. I think he had sisters who were twins." Yep, the guy in 35C was a schoolmate of my Dad's cousin's kids in Sumas, Washington. The Zylstras moved from Sioux County, Iowa, to Whatcom County, Washington, about 1920, as I recall. The guy in 35C says, "Oh, then they were the 'Old Dutch'." He explained that, in Whatcom County, the "Old Dutch" came before the Depression; the "New Dutch" came after. It turns out the nice guy in 35C lived for several years in Sioux County, Iowa, where my Fonkert relatives lived. Andy Visser still works for a company in Rock Valley, Iowa, but he commutes back and forth from his home on the Olympic Peninsula across Puget Sound from Seattle. Oh yes, about the book: the Zerubavel book is provocative. It's not really about genealogy as we know it, but more about how people identify in regards to race, ethnicity, and nationality. I'm going to blog about the book in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

Dutch Treat: Finding Dutch Ancestors

I've been brushing up on my Dutch and Frisian genealogy in advance of my lectures next weekend at the Yakima Valley (WA) Genealogical Society. I love Dutch genealogy mostly because I'm Dutch (My wife and I dance in wooden shoes), but also because the research resources are so great. Today, I'd like to endorse three great sources.

First, my friend Rob van Drie recently published an English-language guide to Dutch genealogy research. Rob van Drie and Suzanne Needs, Dutch Roots: Finding Your Ancestors in The Netherlands is available as an e-book from Amazon.com (may soon be available in the Apple Store). This richly illustrated book covers both the basics -- civil registration, population registers and church records -- and more advanced sources like military, guardianship and court records. Rob is Deputy Director of the Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie in The Hague.

Did I say Dutch genealogy is easy? Well, the basics really are. If you don't believe me, check out Genlias. At Genlias, you can not only learn about Dutch civil registration records, but search for your Dutch ancestors' birth, marriage and death records. Although civil registration began a bit earlier in some southern Netherlands areas, it began in most of the country in 1811, with the arrival of Napoleon. Civil registration records are especially productive for genealogists because both marriage and death records commonly give ages, birth places, and parents' names. With a little ingenuity, you can identify ancestry back to the late 1700s.

Finally, I urge you to check out Digital Bronbewerkingen Nederland and Belgie (Digital Resources Netherlands and Belgium) at GeneaKnowHow.net. This site will link to you an amazing number of Internet resources for Dutch and Belgian genealogy. Just pick a province and start exploring.

So, put on your wooden shoes and take a Dutch genealogy hike. And, let me know what you find.

Genealogies can be more than Social Constructs

I've just become aware of what sounds like an interesting book: Eviatar Zerubavel, Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity and Community. A Boston Globe review states that the Rutger sociologist "pulls back the curtain on the genealogical obsession."

I haven't seen the book, so I don't know how accurate the reviewer's description is. According to the review, Zerubavel objects that genealogists create pleasing genealogies by choosing which ancestral lines to follow (and which to ignore)and by cutting and pasting from other similarly biased genealogies. As anyone who has read Greenwood, Akenson,or Mills, or who has attended IGHR or studied the Genealogical Proof Standard knows, the curtain was pulled back a long time ago.

Yes, it is easy to produce biased and family histories. We do choose which ancestors to follow. Historians, sociologists and other researchers also choose where to focus their attention. A degree of bias is unavoidable, but an effort at neutrality is possible. This is why we promote standards and train genealogists to be disciplined researchers and analysts.

Finally, according to the review, Zerubavel asks: do we really care about our distant ancestors? No, not in the same way that we care about our living siblings and parents. But, we can find our ancestors very interesting. Do historians really care about the Roman Empire? I don't know, but I would bet they find it interesting, and that they believe that studying and understanding it has some value for us today.

Don't feel guilty about your obsession with genealogy!

Thanks to Harold Henderson for making me aware of this book. Harold's comment on Christy Fillerup's Facebook post led me to the Boston Globe review. Now, I need to lay my hands on a copy of Zerubavel's book.