sinking to a new level of uselessness on teh internets...

While rummaging around in a state of ennui, I happened upon some random old photos of someone's ancestors. Being a rather thoughtful and scholarly sort, I've spent many minutes researching their lives and history, which I thought would be interesting to share.


Meet Ethel Quackenbush, the sixth daughter in a family of twelve children, ten of whom died of melancholia during their teens. While Ethel survived well into her forties, she is pictured here at the age of twenty, two years before she burned down the local schoolhouse in a fit of insanity caused by untreated tertiary syphilis, which she contracted from a traveling Bible salesman. She spent the remainder of her life locked up in the family attic, where she spent her time weaving clothing from cat hair and writing incoherent sonnets.




Gertrude Penelope Fizzle and Edwin Codger Fizzle III are pictured here at the left. This notorious brother and sister team secretly continued a ten year incestuous relationship while embezzling large sums from the local church's Widows and Orphans Fund. Although relatively uneducated, the Fizzles managed to leave town with their crimes undetected until some months later. After managing to evade the authorities for several years while disguised as contortionists in a traveling carnival, they were finally hung after being captured between the snakecharmer's tent and the lemonade stand.


Victoria T. Higginbottom (pictured at left) spent most of her youth suffering from a severe goiter, but she never let that dampen her spirits. Condemned to a life of spinsterhood after her fiancé was tragically trampled in a runaway carriage accident, she continued to wear what would have been her wedding gown every day for the rest of her life. She was often seen wandering through the cemetery, but also spent much of her time taking parcels of baked goods to the local Poorhouse. Unlike most of her generation, she lived to the ripe old age of fifty-eight.