I sort of got overly involved in buying precious metals this year (gold, silver parts 1, 2, and 3). I don’t think there is anything wrong with having some precious metals in a portfolio, up to a few percent of total investments, but I probably haven’t been doing it that well. It’s hard to know whether prices will go up or down, but realistically prices would have to go up quite a bit before I could realize any gains by selling physical silver and gold somewhere. Maybe a 40% increase in price to realize a 20% gain. I also put some money in exchange traded funds that you buy like stocks that are much more efficient, allowing a 20% gain with maybe a 24% increase in price. But the price has continued to slide and is down to around $16 per ounce whereas it was $19 when I first started buying and as high as $21 at one point.
Year: 2014
Dell Inspiron 15 3000
I’ve been wanting to upgrade my 6 year old Dell Vostro 1400 for a little while now, though it wasn’t urgent since the Vostro works pretty well, especially after reinstalling everything back in February. I bought a ultra portable Transformer T100 which can also be used as a tablet if you remove the keyboard, but it was too small for me. I thought maybe I could get a powerful laptop that I could use to replace my ancient desktop computer and also take it with me when I needed to, but I find myself using the laptop a lot while watching TV, so I’m not sure I would use the laptop as a desktop very often. Plus I wanted to support two monitors, but I’m not sure how that would work. Maybe I could just get one very large monitor to take the place of two separate monitors.
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Time for Uverse
Earlier this year I wrote about considering upgrading my internet and cable to AT&T Uverse from my currently separate packages consisting of AT&T DSL and Dish Network TV. Ultimately, even though I wanted to upgrade my internet speed, I decided that once I included all of AT&T’s add-on fees, the package was just too expensive to justify.
So the other day two salesmen came by the house pushing me to sign up for Uverse. They were able to put together a package that was going to cost about $105 per month, but right now I am paying about $80 a month, and the $105 was just the introductory rate: after 12 month it would go up substantially. The salesmen said the answer to that was to call AT&T and tell them you wanted to keep the old rate and they would leave it alone. I wonder about that. I ended up sending them on their way without agreeing to anything.
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Orphan Website
When I wrote about my ancestors, the McCords, last year, I mentioned a great website where a guy had assembled information from pretty much any family bible that had information about births, deaths, and marriages of people named McCord. One of the bibles quoted there originally belonged to my great, great, great-grandfather, William J. McCord. William McCord had done a great job of recording everyone in his family before him, going all the way back to Scotland, and then everyone that came after him, which his descendants kept adding to until the 1930’s, including the marriage of Mom’s parents and the birth of her two older brothers. Part of the bible information included the indians killing William’s own great-grandfather in Pennsylvania in 1756.
Anyway, that page was a great resource and there were a couple of other bibles there from other family members as well. When I went back to visit the site recently, it was gone. I found the email address of the site owner and he said that he hadn’t had much interest from people in the site and the web provider had gone up on prices recently, so he just let it expire. I asked him if I could host the site on my own server, which I’m already paying for, so it would cost me nothing. He wasn’t sure he had all of the original files, but he started working it. He is a retired doctor and had kept a lot of records. At one point he thought I could scan all of the printouts of the old web pages and post those to my website, so he wanted me to have hard copies of everything. Luckily for me, he wound up finding the electronic files along with all the physical file folders for the 31 different family bibles he documented and mailed me a box of all of this stuff, which I got this week. There is a lot of neat stuff in there, including transcriptions of letters from one of Mom’s aunts or cousins in Birmingham about the McCord family.
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Genealogy and Baseball
I was doing some genealogy research on some of Dad’s family, going back to his great grandparents and working my way down those families, finding some of his second cousins. His great grandfather, John Cashin, who emigrated from Ireland to Augusta, had a lot of children (at least 9), one of whom was Agnes Cashin. Agnes married a jeweler whose parents had emigrated from Germany, named Antone Renkl. They had five children. Their middle daughter was named Fidelis, born in 1890 and a first cousin of Papa’s.
I was working on familysearch.org and trying to find out if Fidelis was ever married. I had found spouses and children of her brothers and sisters already, but if you don’t find a marriage record, it is hard to find records of women once they adopt their married name. I did a Google search on her (how many people could be named Fidelis Renkl?) and found a mention of her in a Charlotte newspaper where she was a maid of honor. Wedding announcements are usually pretty good sources because they mention not only the spouse, but parents and brothers and sisters and sometimes where they live, etc. But the scanned text of the article seemed to be mixed up with something about Ty Cobb, the legendary baseball player. Reading closer, it was clear that Fidelis Renkl was in the article because she was the maid of honor at Ty Cobb’s wedding in Augusta in August 1908. She must have been very good friends with Charlotte “Charlie” Marion Lombard, Cobb’s 17 year old bride. Because he had taken off from the team without permission and was missing games, the wedding was rushed and he took his new wife back to Detroit as quickly as possible. The Tigers were trying to get to the World Series and he wound up missing 4 home games (the Cobbless Tigers still won 3 of them). How long ago was this? It was the fifth world series ever. Detroit wound up with the best record in the American League (no playoffs then), but lost the World Series to the Chicago Cubs. The story of his wedding appears in a book about Ty Cobb here and the newspaper article that mentions Fidelis is here, also quoted below.
I never did find a spouse for her because apparently she never got married. She lived in Alabama most of her life, in Birmingham for a while, where her brother, Antone, and his family lived before he died in a car accident in 1934. She died at age 77 in 1967 in Andalusia, Alabama, where her brother’s widow died and was buried in 1954. So maybe she helped raise her brother’s kids. She was buried in Augusta’s Magnolia Cemetery with a lot of other Renkls and Cashins, even though Papa and Barbadee and a bunch of the more recent Cashins are buried in Westover.
Here’s the text from the Charlotte article:
Augusta, Ga., August 6 Today at high noon, Tyrus Raymond Cobb and Miss Charlie Marion Lombard were quietly married at “The Oaks,” the country home of the bride’s parents, nine miles from Augusta. The ceremony was performed by Rev. Thomas Walker, pastor of the Woodlawn Baptist church, of this city. Mr. William Sheron was best man and Fidelis Renkl was maid-of-honor. Only the most intimate friends and immediate members of the family were present. Cobb arrived this morning from Atlanta and proceeded to the home of his bride-to-be without delay, not even tarrying in town to see the many friends who were anxious to greet him.