Researching my Spanish Ancestry: The California Connection

 (Click here to see a video introduction and overview I produced to go along with this story)
Note: I first published this post in February 2019 on my old College of Charleston "Beyond the Grave" site created for a class I taught for five years at this university. 

During a holiday visit to my folks’ house in Virginia, I asked my mother some questions about her parents. One was where her late father (my grandfather) had worked. I knew that he was at a hotel for many years in Santa Monica but I didn't know which hotel.

"The Miramar" was her response. My immediate reaction was asking if it was located near San Diego. My thoughts went to the Tom Cruise movie "Top Gun" that was set at the fighter pilot school at the Miramar U.S. Navy aviation base.  

No, not that Miramar, Mom said.  It was not until yesterday when I began doing some research for this post that I learned about Santa Monica's Miramar Hotel and its rich, interesting, even glamorous history.  

Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows (courtesy Booking.com)

And I admit to shivering with pride to think my Grandpa Frank spent much of his working career at such a prestigious resort hotel.  

A 2011 article from the Santa Monica Mirror recounts the property's long history.  Early highlights included: 

• The co-founder of Santa Monica, John Percival Jones, built a Victorian mansion called Miramar in 1889
• His wife Georgina would plant a small Australian Moreton Bay fig tree that would grow into the huge landmark and signature tree (below) that dominates the resort's front courtyard

Moreton Bay fig tree at the Miramar 

• Georgina Jones, in 1912, sold the house and property to safety razor inventor King Camp Gillette for $77,500
• Gillette, several years later, would sell to Gilbert Stevenson, who is described as an "eccentric hotelier" in the Santa Monica Mirror article referenced earlier
• Stevenson turned the estate into a hotel, which by the early 1920s became a celebrity hot spot with stars such as Greta Garbo, Betty Grable and Jean Harlow gracing its rooms, restaurant and stage. 
  
  

Biking to the Intracoastal Waterway

We just had to take advantage of the beautiful weather God blessed us with on Sunday, April 14! So we loaded our bicycles in the SUV and drove north up the coastline. 

Destination: the vast Santee Coastal Reserve located off Highway 17 north of McClellanville. I have visited several times over the years but never took a bike. I did a two-part posting about this wildlife management area back in 2015.

Part I.  Part II. 

This website from South Carolina Trails includes a map of the route we took on our bikes, giving the ride an "easy" rating. I would say it's not exactly easy as you really need to pay attention because the conditions of the path differ from good to a little rough as you go along. 

The goal today was to ride to the Intracoastal Waterway. It’s a few miles from the main parts of the reserve so bikes seemed like a fun and expedient way to get there. The trail, overall, was in good shape except for a few sandy patches. 

Once we got there we saw several vessels plying the waters, including this yacht whose skipper tooted the horn for us. 

10 Year Anniversary: My “In the Arms of Angels” Book

 

Wow!  Ten years ago this week my “In the Arms of Angels” Magnolia Cemetery book was released! This first signing at the cemetery was a good omen of so many great experiences to come, meeting so many people (kindred spirits!), giving many presentations and numerous book signings around the Lowcountry, not to mention my five years teaching at College of Charleston my “Beyond the Grave” First Year Experience course. This book and that class would inspire my 2022 book, “Stories from the Underground: The Churchyards of Charleston.” I have several talks and a podcast coming up this spring and summer and all my books are available on Amazon.

This Facebook post appeared in my “Memories” to alert me to this 10-year anniversary. I remember being contacted ahead of the first official book event. The group of gals was driving from Anderson to Charleston and wanted, as part of their Holy City visit, to see if I could meet them at Magnolia Cemetery so they could have me sign my new book for them. 

Of course I will! 

About a week later I held the first book signing for my new book. Longtime Magnolia Cemetery superintendent Beverly Donald (pictured) helped organize and promote the event. Beverly was very helpful with my research and I, in fact, dedicated the book to her and to my parents as well. 

Beverly recently retired as head of the cemetery after more than 40 years of service. Enjoy your retirement, it's well deserved! 

My book publicity efforts included booking (pun intended) an appearance on WCIV-TV's "Lowcountry Live" live program. I was interviewed by Tessa Spencer who since this April 2014 event became the main anchor at Charleston's ABC affiliate. 

The Facebook "memory" anniversary notices keep popping up! This is a post I did on April 13, 2014 about a signing I did at College of Charleston later in the week. 

This is the author photo I used in the book, taken by my lovely wife Alesia. 

ACE Basin Getaway

My Spring Break from school has been a busy one but I was determined to take one day for an excursion to the Lowcountry’s ACE Basin. This is the land of vast nature preserves, a protected watershed region totalling some 1.6 million acres.

On Wednesday I drove south the 60 miles or so to the Bear Island Wildlife Management Area. As this site claims (accurately!) Bear Island is a birdwatcher's paradise.

Here can be explored the 18th and 19th-century rice fields that brought wealth to plantation owners and enslavement to Africans brought (and bought) to toil in swampy waterways like this one. 

Wooden trunks like these continue to be used to control water levels in the former rice fields of the ACE Basin whose name comes from the confluence of the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto Rivers. 

These are happy places for me full of seemingly endless walking and driving trails that lead to waterways where birds of all shapes and sizes may be found. You will also see alligators and sometimes snakes, lizards, raccoons, deer, wild hogs and other land animals. 

Two other wonderlands in this area, similar in layout to Bear Island, are the Donnelley WMA and the Ernest Hollings National Wildlife Refuge. 

My blog documents numerous visits to these great places. See the above links and/or go to search this blog space in the column on the right.

Recent Camera Captures

 The Christmas gift camera feeder continues to be a hit attracting a variety of birds but also an unwelcome squirrel (keep reading). This post features some of the recent activity with 20-second video clips.

Yellow-rumped Warbler 
(aka butter Butt for the splash of yellow it shows from behind on its behind lol)

Tufted Titmouse
(easily recognizable for its "jaunty crest of gray feathers, big black eyes and rust-colored flanks" per the above website)

Ruby-crowned Kinglet
(one of North America's smallest songbirds)

Beautiful Baltimore Oriole

I took these photos last week from my upstairs “bird blind.” There’s a small window in our master bath that winds open enough for me to give my camera lens a clear view of the nearby trees and the bird feeders below. 

Male and female Orioles are still coming regularly to my Christmas gift camera feeder. This bird really loves jelly, especially grape jelly. See this recent post about the cool camera feeder.

New Fossil Find Could be Millions of Years Old!

 

Wow! What a find! There’s a new townhouse development going up just down Dorchester Road from us. From experience I know that when ground around here is dug up on a large scale there may be fossils to be found.

Two Sundays ago we went over and walked around. When I spotted this smallish sandy area at the work site, I paused to give a close look. Lo and behold this round protruding object caught my eye. I knew immediately that it is a shark vertebrae. This one is about an inch and half wide. 

I have found a number of shark teeth and vertebrae before over the years in a few miles radius from where I live. Hard to believe, but the South Carolina Lowcountry was under water (today’s Atlantic Ocean) as far west as Columbia, S.C. millions and millions of years ago. 

People sell shark teeth and vertebrae online! 

Camera Bird Feeder Fun!

 

A surprise Christmas gift (thank you Joseph and Tamy!) has added a new dimension to my birding hobby. 

It’s a bird feeder with a built-in camera that takes video or still shots. It is designed to be mounted on a tree but my immediate thought was how easy it would be for squirrels to get into it and eat all of the seed. 

I'm really liking the features and quality of this camera feeder, my first. Here's a link to it on Amazon. 

Instead of affixing it to a tree, I found a way to firmly attach it to this hanging basket stand that has long been in our backyard. Fits in nicely don’t you think? 

Unusual Bird Sighting

Odd word for an odd bird!

Male Northern Cardinals are known for their vibrant red colors while the female is more subdued with brownish hues and some red edges on her wings. 

They are birds commonly seen at area feeders.

So why the different look to this Cardinal spotted in my backyard a couple weeks ago?

My query on a bird Facebook site solved the mystery. 

Leucistic is a new word for me. A fellow birder identified this Cardinal as having a partial loss of pigmentation due to a lack of melanin. The embedded link at the start of this paragraph includes a photograph of an American Robin with leucism. 

According to an online site, abnormal plumage like this is very rare: 1 in 30,000 birds have leucism or albinism. 

The pale plumage is very noticeable when compared to the male Northern Cardinal. 

The one above looks different, but I agree with the Facebook bird expert who said the leucistic bird is still uniquely beautiful. 

Just as another point of comparison- the female Northern Cardinal. 

St. Augustine Visit Begins 2024 with a Bang!

 

It was quite a treat to begin the new year in a jewel of a city in Florida: 
St. Augustine!

Alesia and I arrived on Jan. 2 and stayed until Jan. 5.

St. Augustine is located on the Atlantic coastline 40 miles south of Jacksonville. From our North Charleston home, the drive was about five hours. 

This was my first time here and I hope it will not be my last because St. Augustine offers so much to see and do.

History…

Shopping…

Fine dining…

Architecture (the Hotel Ponce de Leon built in 1888; since 1968 part of Flagler College)…

Beaches (such as the one here at Anastasia State Park) and even a…

Lighthouse- the St. Augustine Lighthouse that visitors can climb to the top…