What do Terry Bradshaw, Glenn Beck, James Carville, Thomas Edison, Howie Mandel and I have in common?

This is, after all, a blog of Random Thoughts and the following is just about as random as I've gotten.  Maybe it should be called rambling thoughts from the heartland because there isn't a strong continuity of subject matter in any of my subjects. From Travel, to photography, to family history and politics.  Holy Cow, this is beginning to sound like the ramblings of someone with ADHD or ADD.  

And there you have it, the lead-in to my thoughts on ADD.  Why? Because I'm probably the poster child for un-diagnosed ADHD as both a child and an adult.  

An interesting article appeared in the Washington Post recently. Written by Valerie Strauss: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/02/07/adhd-in-kids-what-many-parents-and-teachers-dont-understand-but-need-to-know/

Reading through the article dredged up some painful memories of my school days and reminded me of issues that haunted me through much my adult life,  but at the same time the article offered up some positive thoughts on the subject. From Dr. Ned Hallowell, one of the country’s foremost experts on ADHD: "Too often, teachers and parents (and bosses) jump to what I call “the moral diagnosis,” and ascribe the underachievement to lack of effort or laziness, which leads to lectures, punishments, and a gradual infection of the spirit with the viruses of shame and diminished sense of self.  In fact, the correct diagnosis is of a brain difference, not a brain deficit, and certainly not a moral failing."   I can't even begin to count the number of times teachers wrote on my report card "not working up to potential",  implying of course that I was a smart kid who could do a lot better but who instead was goofing off, not working hard enough. None of that was said because they wanted to be unkind. On the contrary.  My teachers wanted me to succeed.   My parents loved me and wanted the best for me.  As an adult, as a parent and grandparent that much is very clear to me now...it wasn't quite so clear 50 years ago.  

My failing to "work up to potential" was probably especially difficult for my father to deal with or to understand.  Dad was what I might call a "natural scholar", he had excelled in school both as a student and athlete. Success in school or athletics evaded me.   Failure was foreign to him and clearly there was a difference between what he expected of his children, based on his own experiences, and how I was performing.  I really feel bad that he had to suffer through that without understanding the problem. I wish we had learned all this years ago, it would have been so much better for both of us.  

I'm not going to go into the symptoms or treatment of ADHA in children but I thought some of the information on Adult ADD was worth talking about.   

Some of the often cited symptoms of Adult ADD or ADHA are: 
Trouble concentrating and staying focused.  
Hyper Focus....oddly the opposite of the first but can also be problematic. 
Disorganization
Subcategories of Disorganization are:   

• poor organizational skills (home, office, desk, or car is extremely messy and cluttered) 
• tendency to procrastinate
• trouble starting and finishing projects
• chronic lateness
• frequently forgetting appointments, commitments, and deadlines
• constantly losing or misplacing things (keys, wallet, phone, documents, bills)
• underestimating the time it will take you to complete tasks

 Oh....crap, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty and guilty!  
These things have haunted me my entire adult life.  My chronic lateness at work became a department joke. My desk, is just about a picture perfect example of poor organizaional skill.   

There are several other typical and often cited symptoms and they are pretty easy to find online if you are interested. The article in the Post did include a bit of good news.   First the problem is much better understood now than it was when I was a child and many studies have been done. Treatments are for the most part successful, books have been written and children suffering this diagnosis are much more likely to be treated today than children were 50 years ago.

In my case, which is the norm for most people, I  learned to compensate for many of the symptoms so that in many ways you probably would never suspect I ever had such a problem. Oddly it seemed to me, I mentioned this to my sister today and she seemed truly surprised that I thought I had ADD, but my wife said she had suspected such a thing for a long time, of course she's lived with me for almost 50 years and has experienced much of this.  My case remains "un-diagnosed" or only self-diagnosed but I may talk my my physician about this on my next visit.   

Dr. Hallowell noted in the article "In fact, what we call ADD (a terrible term, as it is not a deficit of attention but rather a wandering of attention, and it is not a disorder in my opinion but rather a trait; if you manage it properly it can turn you into a phenomenal success, but if you don’t it can ruin your life, which makes it unique and fascinating) is really a type of mind, genetically transmitted, and composed of a wide array of complex and often contradictory tendencies." 

"On the positive side, which people rarely discuss, people with ADD are the people who founded this country.  They tend to be visionaries, dreamers, explorers, inventors (Edison was a classic), path-finders, discoverers, entrepreneurs (almost all entrepreneurs have ADD), creative types, original thinkers, paradigm breakers, trend-setters, free thinkers, as well as being big-hearted, trusting, generous, and fun."

It is a relief to know I am in good company and I'm thankful that I escaped any great lasting harm. Still it did create issues and some pain along the way.  On the other hand it is part of what made me who I am.   It is interesting to know this was genetically transmitted...I wonder where that came from?  I have no doubt believing dad would have thought it didn't come from his side of the family. This was an eye opening read but I found additional good material at  http://www.helpguide.org/home-pages/add-adhd.htm 

OUR LOVE HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH SOCIAL MEDIA.

I am the unofficial family historian with a membership at Ancestry.com and a regular visitor to several websites related to family history and or history in general.  One place I pay for a membership is NewspaperArchive.com.   There are several good websites with newspaper collections from around the country and around the world.   Some states are better represented in their collection than others.    Indiana newspapers are well represented in their collection and that was one reason I selected them over some of the others.

As I've learned so often there really is nothing new under the sun. While the the mechanics of delivering social media has changed over the last century the message remains the same..."Here I am, look at me, I made this, I did that, join me in my happy, sad, or meaningful endeavors, I am!"

The other evening I did a search for articles containing the name of my Great grandmother Olive Robinson and discovered that she and her family were frequently mentioned in stories from the Monticello Herald. In those days the Monticello paper was a weekly and every week they included "reports" from all the little communities around the county.  Almost always the reports were of mundane, everyday events.  Who went to visit who, who had guests from out of town, who visited someone out of town, who got engaged or got married, funerals attended.....in short they were almost always just reports of neighborhood social events.  As I was reading the items it occurred to me "Oh my God.....these sound just like what I read at Facebook"  It became quite clear to me...our ancestors were every bit as hooked on social media as some of us are today.  The only difference I could see was that they didn't have the option of including a photo of the group gathered for the dinner party they were reporting about, or a picture of their new car.    Three randomly selected articles are shown below as the sort of Social Media our ancestors enjoyed.

I am confident that had "Facebook" existed in 1915 my great grandmother would have been a power user of the app.

WHO ARE THOSE PEOPLE, AND WHY DID GRANDMA SAVE THIS PICTURE?

Cooper-Best Family Reunion Circa 1904

There are 75 individuals in this picture.   It was given to me about 1987 by my grandfather Robinson's first cousin Harry Klepinger.  I easily recognized my great great grandfather, David Cooper sitting in the first row off the ground...what I've since come to call Patriarch row. Harry told me that it was a picture of a Cooper & Best Family reunion.  His parents are on the far right side and two of his older siblings are standing high in the back row but he didn't remember who many of the others were and he didn't have any idea what the location was or the occasion, other than a "reunion". David Cooper was Harry's maternal grandfather.  The only identification on the picture was written on the reverse indicating the names of the two families involved.  Coopers and Bests.  David Cooper was married to Amanda Best and she had died before this picture was taken.  In a closer examination with a magnifying glass I realized that three of David Cooper's children were also present, William P. Cooper, Kate Klepinger, and Mary Schoonover.  My own great grandmother and any of her family seemed to be missing.  Everyone else was a mystery.      This might have remained a mostly unidentified picture but for two reasons.   Collaboration, and the internet.  For several years this remained in a folder of other Cooper family pictures and data.

A few years later I connected with Cheryl Hipp, a great great granddaughter of Isaac Newton Best and we exchanged some family data. Isaac was the brother of Amanda Best Coooper.   I had started scanning my old family photographs and I sent Cheryl a copy of this image telling her the names of those I knew and asking if she recognized anyone else in the picture based on the old family photographs she had in her possession.  Imagine my surprise when she wrote back and told me that she also had that very picture in her own collection and that she knew which was her great grandfather and grandfather.  

If descendants of both Amanda and Isaac had copies there must have been many copies of the image given to others who were in attendance that day and while we are still waiting for another copy to turn up we have been able to identify several other family members based on other photographs posted to various family trees at Ancestry.com and others by simply going through our own collections.

One of the first chores we accomplished was figuring out the year it was taken.   Since Amanda was not in the picture we knew it was taken after her death in 1896.   We also realized that William P. Cooper's wife, Lottie was standing next to him and she died in June 1905.  So there we had our brackets.   Fashions are ever changing, and because of that change it is often possible to date an image with a fair amount of accuracy based only on the clothing being worn in the picture, and this picture is loaded with fashion hints all of which point to the first decade of the 20th Century.

Cheryl sent copies of the picture to several other Best family researchers she was exchanging information with asking for them to look for anyone they might recognize. We made a low resolution copy of the image and numbered each person then Cheryl made a spread sheet and we plugged in the names next to the numbers of those we knew.  That led us to thinking more about the image in a couple of different ways.   First....what event was this?  Was it just a run of the mill family reunion or was something else going on?  Had the family gathered for a celebration of a birthday or wedding anniversary, or maybe even a funeral?   Cheryl and I had both started out calling it a picture of a Cooper/Best family Reunion...and then we started thinking about family reunions and other family gatherings.  In our experience two large families might come together for a funeral or wedding, but usually other gatherings involve one side of your family or the other, not usually both.   David Cooper was married to Amada Best, and her brother Isaac N Best was married to David's sister Rebecca....so there was more than the average mixing between those two families, but still it seemed to me that if it were a family reunion it was probably for one famil or the other, not both, except those that intermarried.  Keeping that in mind it's probably safe to assume the majority of the others are going to be members of that family.

The presence of Henry Best, older brother of Amanda and Isaac N in the photo along with some of his children seem to tip the balance toward this being a Best family reunion picture.   Also present was David and Rebecca's brother Benjamin Cooper, but his presence at a Best family function is easily explained because he was making his home with his sister Rebecca and her family at this time. Henry Best, on the other hand had lived in Iowa for many years indicating a trip back to Indiana required a sort of special effort and his presence at a Cooper family reunion would seem less likely. 

Two additional spreadsheet pages were created to help us evaluate the image and those who might have been present.  One was a list of the various Best family members who might have attended and their ages and known residences in 1900.  The other was for the Cooper family members who might have attended along with ages and residences.     We have assumed that those in attendance were probably all descendants of Isaac and Jane Best, early pioneers of Tippecanoe County, along with those members of the Cooper family who had married into the Best family.   Isaac and Jane had ten children, but by 1905 only three remained, Isaac N, Henry, and Samuel who died in July of that year.  However, many of Isaac and Jane's grandchildren and great grandchildren were alive in 1905.  It is possible that the invitation extended beyond the families of the children of Isaac and Jane and perhaps some cousins might have shown up also.

We now have positive or nearly positive identifications of 23 of the faces in this picture, but neither of us are ready to throw in the towel.  Though not yet half done, both Cheryl and I feel there is hope that we might eventually figure out as many as half of these people, or maybe somewhere in a box someone has another copy of this picture on which the original owner wrote the names of everyone. Wouldn't that be nice!

Just because you don't know everyone in your old family pictures doesn't mean they can't be figured out with some effort and help from others and a bit of luck.  There are some good books devoted to working with your old family photographs.  Well worth the cost if you are serious about working with the old photos.