Posts
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Fun With Family History
My great-great grandfather was born in 1850 and moved to Seattle from Kansas in the mid-1880’s. I’m not sure why he moved to Seattle, but I do know that my great-great grandmother died in 1885 at age 32 and is buried in Kansas. I also know that the 1889 Washington State Census lists him living in Seattle’s Second Ward with a “housewife” named Mattie, age 21.
In most records, his name appears as P.J. Pratt. His occupation was “teamster” but he shows up most frequently in the Post-Intelligencer buying and selling plots of real estate. As one example, he bought lot 14, block 28 in the Eden & Knights tract on December 1, 1890 for $500 from C.H. Pierce. And he sold the same lot on February 7, 1893 for $3000 to A.H. Turner. I think that lot is at the corner of E Cherry St and 19th Ave (i.e., worth considerably more today).
In 1890, P.J. hired a contractor to build a house for his growing family on property he owned at 506 20th Ave. He agreed to pay $225 for labor and furnish the materials, and the contractor C.A. Dobson agreed to build a six-room cottage. While the house was being built, the family took up residence in a smaller structure on the same lot.
Seattle apparently did not keep weather records until the 1890’s, but one can easily imagine Saturday, June 7, 1890 being a typical Seattle June day—high temperature in the mid-60’s, cloudy with an occasional sunbreak, and a long early summer evening with sunset after 9 PM.
On this Saturday around 5:30 PM, P.J. went to the house and asked Dobson to give him the key, as P.J. wanted to work on the house himself over the weekend. Dobson refused, because Pratt had not yet paid for the house. I could not possibly describe what happened next better than the P-I:
“Dobson refused to give up the key, and Pratt cursed him. Dobson started to walk away. Pratt followed, and began beating Dobson, who fell to the ground. (A witness) pulled Pratt off. When Pratt rolled over, it was found that Dobson was dead.”
My great-great grandfather was charged with murdering Dobson. His case was number 118 in the new King County Superior Court. The trial was held in August and September. To defend himself, P.J. lawyered up, hiring J.T. Ronald (who would later serve as Mayor of Seattle 1892-1894) and Samuel Piles (who would later serve as a U.S. Senator 1905-1911).
I have the court records and sadly there is no transcript, so I’ll never really know how P.J. managed to be acquitted. In his obituary, it says he claimed self defense.
On his deathbed in 1897, he made a statement that was published in the P-I. “I am sure,” he said, “that none of the blows I struck Mr. Dobson were instrumental in causing his death…The blows that I struck were nothing more than would be given in any ordinary fight.” He went on to say Dobson died when he fell and hit his head on a pointed tree stump.
P.J. is buried in an unmarked grave at Lake View Cemetery. Last time I was in the neighborhood, his house was still standing–expanded from original form and now a small apartment building. I wonder if anyone who lives there knows its history? And my family has now lived in Seattle for five generations and counting.
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So Whatcha Want?
I’ve shared this advice with a couple of people in the last few days and thought it worth writing down.
It is very easy to identify the things you don’t want from your job. These things tend to be obvious. You probably don’t want to work with assholes, for example. You probably wish there was less chaos, and more order. And when you begin thinking this way, it is very easy to start believing that the grass is greener and a job change will solve all of your problems.
I think this is a mistake.
It is very difficult to identify the things you do want from your job. These things are rarely obvious. But you have to identify those things before you can know if 1) your current job isn’t going to work for you, and/or 2) if any particular job is going to work for you.
You have to put a fair amount of energy into thinking about the things you want! Some things are easy. You want to get paid, of course, and maybe you have geographic limitations. It gets trickier. Maybe you want to work with a particular set of technologies, or programming paradigms. Maybe you have opinions about the sort of product(s) you are willing to work on.
Once you know what you want, then–and only then–can you know if you are making the right decision.
Put another way, someone told me once that you should never quit your job after you’ve had a bad day. If you have a good–or even a normal–day, and you still want to leave, you know you are making the right decision.
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Our Modern World
Of all the conveniences in our modern world, the ability to deposit a check using my iPhone camera might be the most amazing. Remember having to actually go to a bank to make a deposit?
Now if we could just move past paper checks altogether…
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Hello World
Over the years, I’ve tried many different flavors of personal website, from LiveJournal to Wordpress to lovingly hand-crafted HTML to my own weirdo hand-rolled “convert markdown to HTML using a Makefile and some shell scripts” solution.
Seems like GitHub pages are the latest craze, so I thought I’d give it a whirl and see what happens.
Update: Yeah, that was fun. GitHub pages are all fine and dandy but I can just as easily roll my own. Jekyll generates a static website–so it doesn’t really matter whether I use GitHub pages or just upload it to the S3 bucket I’ve been using for eons via a GitHub workflow.
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