(Super Bowl ice carving, from 2006 Plymouth Ice Spectacular.)What a great hobby weekend! Every weekend should be so much fun. I spent the bulk of the weekend doing genealogy research and taking pictures. If I’d had time for writing too that would have just iced the cake. But hey, cake is good all by itself!
Friday night I went to the Plymouth Ice Spectacular so I could try my hand at getting some night-time, ice sculpture shots. Problem was, the ice that was carved during the day was all sadly melting away. The temperatures got up to 50 degrees during the day and that did in most of the sculptures. Most of them were covered with scaffolding and tarps trying to protect them from the elements to come… heavy rain. So no pretty ice sculptures, no colored spot lights. A wasted trip.
Saturday I went to the Detroit Public Library, Burton Collection with to-do list in hand. It had been quite a while (several months) since I’d been there so I had lots to look up. My main focus was on garnering information about some of the characters in my novel. As is often the case, I came up with nothing on 5 of the six items on my to-do list. But I hit the jackpot on the one item I was successful with (tracking ownership/management of my grandfather’s bakery). I used the City Directories heavily and wished for the thousandth time that there was a more convenient way to access them. There is just so much great information in them.
But the one piece of information I was most hoping to find on Saturday still eludes me. I was looking for the date of death of Felix Jaruga. He remains a mystery to me. I know when he came to Detroit (1912). I have a copy of his marriage record (married in 1918). I found him on the 1920 census, and in city directories up until 1920. And then I can find no trace of him. The city of Detroit death index doesn't list him as having died. I’ll have to keeping digging. Probably need to make another trip to the local library to access Ancestry again.
After the trip to the library, I made another trip to Plymouth to try to get some photos of the ice sculptures. I was more successful this time and took a dozen or so photos before the long shadows of early evening took over. I would have liked to have stayed longer to get some night shots but had to rush off to a birthday party.
Sunday I made yet a third trip to Plymouth to take more photos. I got some really good ones this time! The third time was the charm!
