1. Submitted a haunted house story (true!) to Strange Horizons. I have no idea how it will be received but giving it a shot makes me feel good. If it doesn't make it, I'll keep trying elsewhere. It's another blend of fact and fiction which is in my comfort zone, but not Alaska or flying so outside it as well. But it's on its way so that's all good.

2. April column is done! I'll send that tomorrow after a reread for typos.

3. Finished The Boneshaker by Kate Milford (for the May column) and loved it. And emailed Kate and it looks like she will be interviewed for the Summer Blog Blast Tour which...

4....will be the week of May 17th. We are now all in the interview scheduling phase and as usual, looks like it will be fabulous.

5. I've finished the two wish lists at Powells Books for the TBD in April. We'll be trying to get folks to buy books to help a couple of reservation schools (one in AZ and one in NM). More info to follow shortly (the wish lists go active on April 7).

6. Finished a biography of Jack London who wrote an amazing amount of books considering he was only 42 when he died. I am now officially extremely impressed.

7. Sent off two more reviews for Booklist - I am swamped with Booklist this month but it's all good reading. Only one left by the end of the month.

8. Determined multiple links between my father and Jack Kerouac which has convinced me that yet again, every single damn thing I write is really more about my family then anything else. (I might as well just stop fighting this and accept it is who I am as a writer.)

9. Started The Shadow Hunt by Katherine Langrish (reminding me of Ladyhawke in a good way) and Rowing to Sweden: Essays on Faith, Love, Politics and Movies by Fredrick Barton (very good). On deck: For the Win by Cory Doctorow, Total Oblivion, More or Less by Alan DeNiro, and Carrier by Bonnie Rough. Three reviews to write: The Boneshaker, Foiled by Jane Yolen and Captivity by Deborah Noyes.

10. Many errands run (checks deposited, dinner items purchased, prescriptions (which went up AGAIN) picked up and library books returned and new ones checked out (for the boy). If I run this weekend then I will truly feel caught up on everything....which is almost too shocking to contemplate!

When I first started researching my family history way back in the late 1980s there was no internet and it was mighty expensive to find things out. So when my grandmother and her sister (my great aunt Marion) asked me to look into the mystery surrounding their father's grave it took a while to sort things out. First, you have to know that in NYC it is common for multiple bodies to placed (stacked) in one plot. In the case of Tom Lennon it was a three body plot but I have found as many as six bodies in plots owned by my grandfather's family. So having someone else in there with your loved one is pretty common but you usually know who you ended up with. My great aunt Agnes had visited Tom's grave a couple of years before and taken note of the woman buried beneath him: Margaret Rowland. No one in the family had a clue who Margaret was.

How do you resist a challenge like this one?

The first thing I did was write to St Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx and ask for the full names of everyone buried in my great grandfather's plot. I got back that Tom and Margaret were there together and also that the grave had been bought by Edward Rowland, husband of Margaret, when she died in 1918. (It cost $38 if you're wondering.) With the exact date of death I was able to send away for a copy of her death certificate for genealogical reasons (no Ancestry.com back then). We were thinking she was an aunt or cousin of my great grandfather but the death certificate proved to a be a bit more complicated. Margaret was born in the U.S. in 1875 (and only 42 when she died of uterine cancer). Her parents were both born in Ireland and their names were Bridget Waldren & John Lennon.

On one hand you have to take the names of deceased parents & circumstances of birth on a death certificate with a grain of salt, because they can often be wrong. But John Lennon was the name of Tom's father and my grandmother thought he had been married twice (maybe - all of her Lennon grandparents were dead long before she came along). Tom's mother was named Catherine (and we had his baptismal certificate along with his siblings' from the Church of the Sacred Hearth in the Bronx so we knew the names of John & Catherine were true.) So maybe Margaret was from the first marriage and thus his half sister? Bridget is such an unusual name and the Irish are infamous for keeping names for generations (we are knee deep in Catherines for example). For the past couple of decades we just looked at it all this way and put a big question mark next to Bridget and when she might have died.

Until I got all busy recently on Ancestry.com.

I was looking in the 1900 census for another family member - supposed sister or aunt of Tom - who had an unusual married name (more on her later - but she's another Catherine). And I found her, as a widow in the 1900 NYC census, living with her children and her sister Margaret (born 1874 - which is close enough) and her brother Robert (Tom had an Uncle Rob my grandmother knew quite well) and her mother, a widow named Bridget Lennon.

Talk about a shocker.

Bridget was not the first wife of John Lennon and her children were not Tom's half siblings. She was Tom's grandmother - married to John Lennon, Sr who was apparently Tom's grandfather (we had never gotten that far back but I'm so not surprised to find yet another John). Tom was buried with his aunt - not his half sister. Here's how it looks:

John Lennon married Bridget Waldren and they had at least four children: Catherine, Margaret, Robert & another John. (My grandmother personally knew Catherine & Rob.)

The younger John married Catherine Nolan and they had lots of kids (like another John, a James, a Catherine, etc) including, in 1888, Tom Lennon. (And both died before any of Tom's kids ever knew them.)

Tom Lennon married Julia Pressl in 1910 and had eight children - including my grandmother (another Catherine) (and yes - there is another John in there as well).

So after twenty years, Margaret finally led me to Bridget who all this time was a generational leap that I never recognized. My great great great grandmother died in New York City - she seems to be the first generation to come here from Ireland. She is the one who made the trip and now I know her - I know who she is.

Days like this, I miss my grandmother more than you can possibly imagine. She would have loved this. Now, I just need to find where Bridget was buried and when she died and exactly who all those kids were. But still....I'm a lot further along then I used to be!

PS. Is this the perfect St Patrick's Day post, or what?

[Post pic of St Raymond's Church & Cemetery in the Bronx in 1905 - where my great grandfather is buried. The church is still open; Tom Lennon, 1928. He died five years later at age 43.]

I have been reading a lot about Thoreau lately because when writing about people who disappear into the wilderness, Thoreau is generally pretty front and center in their lives. What's interesting though is that once you become aware of Thoreau you start to find him everywhere. I am knee deep in Thoreau lately, to the point that I actually laugh when I find him quoted on the page. At first it was funny but last night when I opened a new book I'm reviewing for Booklist on a lost Amazon tribe I almost threw it across the room when I saw the opening quote - yes, it was all about wilderness and it was from my dear friend Henry.

(Don't worry, I didn't actually toss it and I'm not holding it against the author. It was just momentary wig out.)

In Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury she has a great passage where she describes the annoying American obsession with Thoreau (or what I've come to term "Thoreaumania):

The mention of Walden in polite society inevitably elicits great praise. "My favorite book," someone says. Or "I live by that book." What they mean is that they know about the book and take it to be a handbook for the simpler life they might want to lead, if they ever got tired of making money and going to parties, or if they ever came to believe that the status in their community that makes them comfortable was really not important at all.

I decided we had all jumped the Thoreau shark when I recently read one of the new "Bright Young Thing" interviews in Vanity Fair with a twenty-something debutante I've never heard of who, of course, mentioned Walden as one of her favorite books of all time. (I can't begin to tell you how relieved I was when this month's pick actually mentioned Harry Potter.)

What bothers me about all this Thoreau love is not that I don't like him or what he wrote; after reading The Thoreau You Don't Know I'm even more intrigued then ever by how interesting he was. But I don't ever read about him in other books in anything other than an idealized way. He is always out in the woods - way way way out in the woods - and his quotes are used to sell the idea that only out in the woods far from humanity and technology and any sort of modern society can you truly find out WHAT MATTERS. There is a superiority to many of the ways I see him quoted as in, "just like Thoreau I get what life is all about and you people, who are reading about my perfect life, don't."

It makes one want to grab a copy of Walden and go smack someone with it.

As annoying as this can be (and it really does get annoying); it has also been very interesting to see how Thoreau has become short hand for a trendy life style choice. People throw out his name or quote from Walden to attach their own words to an ideal they think he espoused. Basically, you slap his name into a book and that is short hand for "serious nature writer" or "true nature lover" or, when used more than once, "wilderness guy or girl lives here". When I saw it in the Amazon book though I wondered if this was all the author's fault or if editors were part of the problem as well. Have we all become so used to the lazy name dropping of Thoreau that we expect to see it in any book that might be about wilderness and thus publishers make sure it is there? On some level it's like he's become the fast food element of nature writing - the fries with your story of inner peace and beauty in the woods.

The thing is, I remain deeply impressed by Thoreau. It's everybody else I"m starting to have issues with.

[Post pic of Walden Pond.]