Where does De Kalb come from?

Quite unexpectedly it has become handy that I have family members that have spent some time living in the great state of Texas. I have been updating the Austin History Center's Biographical Sources finding aid with useful Internet sites and I need to test to make sure that the web sites are, in fact, useful. Who better to test genealogy web sites with than your very own family? Especially when your very own family has a fairly unique surname. Your own family does not make for a very good test case if your last name is Smith.

When looking up my cousin's Texas birth record I learned that my aunt's middle name is Shepard? I also learned that my grandmother's middle name was De Kalb. Amazing the things you don't know about your own family. I wonder where these names came from? Chances are that I will only remember this newly discovered information for about the next 3 days but I know where to find the information if I ever need it again. You never know....

And if anyone is wondering if I have had any additional weird Whitman coincidences - never fear. I am currently processing the family papers a of multi-generational farm family from Richland, Texas that doesn't seem to care about anything other than family, the weather and church. This collection is one of the last places I would expect to see Whitman's name but it turns out that one of the family members was an Austin police officer. Guess where he was on August 1, 1966? You guessed it - being shot at from the UT Tower by Charles Whitman.

And I thought not having a washer and dryer was bad...

I have always been a bit obsessive about those real estate flyers you see posted on the street. If I am walking by I will always stop to at least look at the pictures. Now that I am looking for a place to live I will even cross the street to see what is for sale.

Yesterday while I was walking to find some lunch I picked up a flyer for a 2/2 condo in a building called the Penthouse Condominiums. Perfect location - just 4 blocks from work. Unfortunately the flyer advertised "laundry facilities in the building" which is real estate code for the fact the condos don't have washer and dryer hookups. I will live miles out of town before I will go back to lugging my dirty laundry into the basement.

Turns out that not having washers and dryers in the condos is not the worse thing about that condo building. After lunch I returned to work and continued processing the FBI files from the Charles Whitman shootings. And what should catch my eye? Before the building just four block from my work was known as the Penthouse Condominiums it was called the Penthouse Apartments. Penthouse Apartments is where Charles Whitman's mother lived and this is where her son shot her.

I don't remember that being mentioned on the advertising flyer.

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Photo courtesy of the Austin History Center.