More Bathroom Blogging
I recently listened to one of Dick Eastman’s podcasts. He’s been the guru of technology for genealogists and a reliable reviewer of various genealogy publications for years in his terrific online newsletter. The newsletter that was initially delivered via email has morphed into a blog http://blog.eogn.com/, and lately he’s resurrected his dj skills and has developed a podcast as well. The National Genealogical Society’s annual meeting was in Chicago last week and he took advantage of the occasion to interview some well known folks in the field.
One guy he interviewed, however, was not as well known, at least to me. He was the dinner speaker for the Conference. And he did make an impact. His topic was excavating where outhouses had stood. When I first saw the topic, I thought surely this isn’t what I think it is.
But it was. Craig Pfannekuch is an amateur archaeologist and he encourages those of us who can do so to excavate where our family outhouses stood. He even teaches how to do it and what to look for.
I have done a lot of things that have stretched me in one way or the other since I got into genealogy–I’ve called people I’ve never met to discuss possible family connections. I’ve visited courthouses in lots of counties from Ohio to Texas and worked shoulder to shoulder with the landmen who were in there tracing mineral rights, not to mention a spider or two that has crawled out of a crevice. I’ve traveled to some pretty desolate cemeteries to take photos and check headstones.
But I think I’m drawing the line here. My grandparents in South Dakota had an outhouse until well into the 1970s. It may actually still be there. When we visited in 1981, it was still there and they still used it. They did finally get indoor plumbing sometime around 1967, but they didn’t haul off the outhouse. My grandad called it “Ike” and considered it his duty to save the indoor plumbing by continuing to use the outhouse. Truth be told, he probably considered it our duty as well, but some of us were unwilling to make the trip that was now so unnecessary in our minds. (I have no idea the origin of his name for Ike, though it must have had some connection to the president at the time he built the original one.) My grandmother loved to tell about the time she heard me screaming bloody murder out there–she thought for sure I’d fallen in (a special fascinating terror for me when I was little). When she opened the door to check on me, she discovered I’d dropped the roll of toilet paper in and was, for some reason, quite distraught. I have no memory of that particular incident though I have lots of memories of Ike.
I won’t go into details. I will share that when we visited in 1981, my husband had some definite questions about the fact that there were two toilet seats. I had no answers–it’s just the way it was. I’ve included some photos from that trip–we call them South Dakota Gothic.
