It's gruesome that someone so handsome should care

[sovay]

As a consolation for fighting with our insurance, I bought a ridiculous and irresistible object off the internet, and it arrived just in time to feel like a present for the success of spatch's impromptu—and insurance-covered—visit to urgent care this afternoon.





I do not know the origin of this double-sided clipping; I assume some kind of Hollywood trade paper, but could not actually ask the seller. Anyone who recognizes the format, feel free to chime in. I have a slight instinctive skepticism of the claim of descent from Adams—it sounds like just the studio legend for a New Englander—but then again spatch is descended from Hannibal Hamlin, so these things happen. According to the biography of Blondell which he has been occasionally reading to me, as her parents were vaudevillians, her first cradle really was a prop trunk.

Comments

[sholio]

I love acquiring interesting little historical errata like this. Different topics and kinds of things, but it's a different and fun feeling to have the actual object in your hand, as opposed to simply seeing pictures of it online.

[sovay]

I love acquiring interesting little historical errata like this.

I used to run into them at flea markets and curio shops, whence some of our household totems like my candid photograph of George VI and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in Canada in 1939 or the engineer's diagram of tracks and signals from the Boston Terminal Company in 1905, but for obvious reasons I haven't been to one of those in years. I am not used to the same process online, but I have to say that as a first and slightly experimental effort, this has really worked out.

Different topics and kinds of things, but it's a different and fun feeling to have the actual object in your hand, as opposed to simply seeing pictures of it online.

Yes. Sometimes it's enough to know they exist, which is the utility of objects I love in museums, but sometimes it really does make a difference to able to take them home. I need to find a very small picture frame. Currently it is in—and slightly the wrong dimensions for—one of those plastic sleeves I used to put around my Magic cards.

[julian]

On Corey, I'm in the stage of recovering from a migraine where I'm interested in things but don't have the energy to really chase them down, so:

Dunno! The Adams family had a lot of children and a lot of descendants, so there could be some stray cousin, but they seem pretty good at tracking and he's not on the main lists. http://henryadamsofbraintree.com/president-john-adams-descendants.html, f'rex.

ETA: Oh, right, acestry.com; I'm not subscribed ATM, but his mom was Julia Etta Reid McKenney Corey, and those names (that is, McKenney or Corey) don't show up as Adams-connected names.

ETA2: Also, urgent care Bad. Except insofar as it exists to help people, I mean.

[sovay]

Dunno! The Adams family had a lot of children and a lot of descendants, so there could be some stray cousin, but they seem pretty good at tracking and he's not on the main lists.

That's a really neat compilation! Thank you for it, even if it's irrelevant to Wendell Corey. He was born in 1914, which does fall within the scope of the generations listed.

Less cynically, it could always have been something his family believed to be true—my father's father styled himself in descent from the Austrian Taaffes and it wasn't like we had proof to the contrary when I was a child. I believe I was in college when my father's youngest brother turned up the genealogical facts that it was really some Irish Taaffes who had emigrated to California in the nineteenth century, very popular choice.

[edit] I didn't know to look for McKenney, but I did see there were no Coreys married in. Jeez, he got most of his face from his mother. The cat-bones and the setting of his eyes and the damn near no visible eyebrows in black and white. What an absolutely weird thing for me to be able to know about an actor who died in 1968.

[edit edit] It did help, thank you! spatch was taken seriously and sent home with medications and a plan if they do not sort out the problem in short order, which is better than some visits I've had.

[edit edit edit] I hope your migraine is ebbing fast.

[julian]

It may well have been the "family history believed to be true" thing, yeah, because one of their great-great etc who came to the US was a John. Also, they had an unrelated John Quincy. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Adams-1340, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Adams-55186

So it seems to be a totally different Adams family, which is fun since they're both ginormous. (But he *was* related to President Ford! Which would only have been useful to publicists if they were also time travelers.)

(And yeah, some urgent care places are more for the urgent and less for the care. I approve of a mixture.)

[sovay]

because one of their great-great etc who came to the US was a John. Also, they had an unrelated John Quincy.

That's hilarious and feels like history cheating.

So it seems to be a totally different Adams family, which is fun since they're both ginormous. (But he *was* related to President Ford!

Also funny! How did you find it out?

Which would only have been useful to publicists if they were also time travelers.)

I admire this sentence.

[julian]

"That's hilarious and feels like history cheating."

Quite! (Though Corey's JQA was born in 1820, so possibly named for the more famous version.)

"Also funny! How did you find it out?"

Um. Followed links in the wikitree, so it's not verified by other sources or anything, but the wikitree is backed up by the Guaranteed Obsessiveness of family genealogists, so I'm mostly content.

[sovay]

Followed links in the wikitree, so it's not verified by other sources or anything, but the wikitree is backed up by the Guaranteed Obsessiveness of family genealogists, so I'm mostly content.

That counts! Unlike my uncle, I do not spend a lot of time pursuing family research, so I don't know very much about what resources are available beyond, like, the census and newspapers.

[edit] . . . he's also related to spatch. Not closely on account of all the drift since the eighteenth century, but I'm going to call it funnier than being related to Gerald Ford.

The grandmother of Corey's John Quincy Adams was an Elizabeth Noyes from Newbury, then of the Masssachusetts Bay Colony. If I'm reading this metric ton of prolific and repetitiously named Puritans right, she's four generations down from William Noyes, whose sons James and Nicholas were the founders of Newbury. spatch is supposed to be descended from Nicholas who leapt ashore in 1634. Elizabeth definitely is.

I have one ancestral line that goes back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636 and cursory research at the time when it came to light indicated that spatch and I were not related and if that's still true, it's starting to feel like a miracle.

[asakiyume]

Wonderful, and how good of you to have finished wrangling the insurance in time for an impromptu emergency room visit (I hope Spatch is now on the mend).

[sovay]

Wonderful, and how good of you to have finished wrangling the insurance in time for an impromptu emergency room visit (I hope Spatch is now on the mend).

Thank you! Fortunately, it was not an ER, just the next best thing to a walk-in. He's slept most of the day since, which looks like an improvement on the previous state to me.

[gwynnega]

What a cool find!

[sovay]

What a cool find!

It was really well-timed.

[skygiants]

These clippings are a delight!

[sovay]

These clippings are a delight!

I am delighted by them! Also by the fact that Corey's professional bio basically is "here is your fave, he dies a lot," which high school me feels mildly attacked by.

[choco_frosh]

Interestingly (though you may already know this from some other source), we can date this scrap pretty precisely to 1950, since (according to Wikipedia) that's when For Heaven's Sake came out AND when Blondell's marriage to Mike Todd finally burned down.

[sovay]

that's when For Heaven's Sake came out AND when Blondell's marriage to Mike Todd finally burned down.

Yes! I dated it by Corey's latest film, but spatch also did it by Blondell and Mike Todd.

[oracne]

That's so neat!

[sovay]

That's so neat!

It makes me happy!

[heavenscalyx]

I'd be so much more inclined to believe he was somehow related to Giles Corey...

[sovay]

I'd be so much more inclined to believe he was somehow related to Giles Corey...

I can't trace his father's family back far enough to find out with the records available to me (see conversation with julian above), but at this point I wouldn't be surprised!