The Families: Vol. 2
Family Histories, Stories & Trees and a Few Personal Odds & Ends
Besides the family histories on this website, the extended pandemic lockdown gave me the luxury of putting in writing several stories of periods in my life I thought might be interesting to others. Initially, I wrote about my strange tour of duty in Army Intelligence in the late 1960s, focused as it was on the widespread riots and anti-war protests of the day and the development of space as a new war theater. Next, I turned to the end of the Daley machine’s rule in Chicago politics in the 1970s, the bankruptcy of United Press International at the hands of a couple of self-aggrandizing misfits, and Encyclopaedia Britannica’s largely unrecognized role in advancing the human/machine interface early in the Digital Age. When I strung together these tales with some more personal recollections from my younger days, the result was the memoir you see here.
The wealth of familial information here may be of interest to you if you are part of the extended Canavan Family celebrated on this website. You’re in this group if you are a descendant of Anthony Canavan (1822-1890) and his wife Ann Hughes (1818 -1899) or someone in your own extended family married one of these descendants as my mother did. Perhaps with help from a few self-selected pack rats in generations that follow me, this family archive or something like it may be sustained as a grab bag of interesting and important lore for some or all of this crowd. Be it family history or the memoir, be careful where you start, as there’s a lot to be bored by in both sections.
