[I haven't found anything helpful to say about this year. I'm OK, pretty much the same as last year at this time, and maybe that's some news--though not much, since Liz and I have the means and the know-how to keep ourselves safe.
But--my God--I never imagined that the U.S. in the 21st century would be so bad at handling a major pandemic, or that the response would be so political, to a thing that has no politics. I've always held the CDC in the highest regard, for good reason, and it's unnerving to think that an institution of such great accomplishment could fall so far short so fast.
Now we have a vaccine, in record time to be sure, but also FINALLY. There are really several that will do the job, in various stages of evaluation. The first shipments in this country are in process, many of them passing through the massive UPS hub in Louisville, about 10 miles from here. The vaccines were not produced by the power of positive thinking, nor by bullying, lying, misogyny, racism, gluttony, narcissism, faith, or any of the other dominant memes of the last few years. They were produced by the efforts of scientists who understand the difference between actual truth and the stuff that you might hope is true.]
What I really want to say is that I have been doing some genealogical research, and enjoying it. Given that much of my career consisted of genealogical research, it's a bit like a busman's holiday, but here I am. The tools are much, much better than they used to be, and the skills I've developed over the year help too, of course.
Officially, I am Richard Ade Kerber, Junior. My father (Richard Ade Kerber, Senior, as you might have inferred) and his brother (Ira Newton Kerber, Junior) were the two sons of (wait for it . . .) Ira Newton Kerber, Senior. For three generations of Kerbers, the only male names were Ira and Richard.
In real life, I've never used the Junior, and never liked it, even as a kid. As soon as I was out of the house, I dropped it from all my official records, and rarely thought about it. However, if you're doing genealogical research you need to be careful about senior/junior pairings, since the names and often the places are identical. That's especially true if you want to use an algorithm to speed through bunches of messy historical records. I've written some of these myself over the years, but most of them relate to calculating statistics on pedigrees rather than displaying them nicely, and, because this involved biomedical research, printing names all over the pedigrees was a distinct no-no. But now I wanted a pretty chart with ancestral names on it, so I downloaded some software that seemed like it might do the job and started fiddling around with it.
It immediately drew a pretty chart, but ignored the names I had supplied. I realized that the software thought my ID numbers were names, so I replaced the former with the latter. And that broke the software. I could see that there weren't too many names, and they weren't too long or weird, so that wasn't the problem. Then I noticed that it had read all the names, but not the suffixes (Jr, Sr. III, etc). So, as far as the algorithm was concerned, I was my own father, and my father's brother was his father, and so on. It only takes one of those to make a stack overflow, but I had at least half a dozen.
After some additional tweaking (I'll spare you all the details of GEDCOM file formats, R code, and the like; suffice it to say that it took longer and was more annoying than seemed possible), the Juniors, etc. were restored and everything worked more or less as planned.
So I have a newfound appreciation for my Junior. Moreover, I've noticed that in recent years, many athletes have been appending Jr, III, and so forth to the names on the back of their jerseys. I thought this was odd, unless, like Ken Griffey Jr. their father was also a famous athlete. But I think now that I was missing the point, and I was missing the point all along. The point, I think, is that wearing the Junior honors your father regardless of (or in spite of) his fame or obscurity.
I think now that my dad might have appreciated the formal respect shown by embracing my Junior-ness more than I understood at the time. He wouldn't ever have said anything, and I can't ask him now, but I feel a little sorry about that. From where I sit, looking at the short end of life, and considering all the lives cut short during this horrific year, any missed opportunity to show respect and appreciation for another person seems like a small tragedy.
