My family has a coat of arms?

Came across this small piece of paper in one of the endless envelopes...

COAT OF ARMS

The Coat of Arms of this Chandler Family was prepared by Miss Fanny Chandler, from an original cut and obtained, from an original obtained from the Herald's College, London, by the Rev. Thomas Bradbury Chandler, D.D., of Elizabeth Town, N.J., when he was there in 1775.

The crest borne on the closed helmet above the Coat of Arms is that of a Pelican in her nest, wounding her breast to feed her young with her own blood — an emblem of parental affection expressive of the family motto "AD — MORTEM FIDELIS". The mantle cut and jagged hanging from the helmet indicates the faithful service of the wearer; the gauntlet, his prowess.

Heraldic colors on the shield are designated by the direction of the lines.

"HE BEARETH CHECKIE, ARGENT AND AZURE, ON A BEND OF THE FIRST, SA., THREE LYONS PASSANT, GULES,"

BY THE NAME OF CHANDLER

So I'm guessing that my great-grandmother, Greta Miriam Chandler Adams (1894-1988), is related in some tangential way to Rev. Thomas Bradbury Chandler (1726-1790), which I could surely confirm if I took the time to sort through my grandmother Helen's genealogy papers and charts, written in her sometimes-hard-to-decipher cursive.

Corroboration concerning this coat of arms can be found, for now anyway, at this RootsWeb page. (Chandler was a moderately common surname in England, originally describing someone who made and sold candles.)

As far as the pelican feeding her young with her own blood, it's called vulning and it's a symbol with a deep religious history that I'm not nearly qualified enough to explain. Victoria Emily Jones, in a 2025 article on Art & Theology, explains how the pelican was "one of the most popular animal symbols for Christ in the Middle Ages" and that vulning has allegorical parallels to the spilling of Christ's blood on the cross giving life to his children. It's much more complicated than that, though, as Jones explains in the heavily-illustrated article. 

Additional information and artwork can be found at the Anglican Diocese of Canberra & Goulburn, the Center for Humans & Nature, and the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art.

(By the way, in the real world, pelicans do not actually wound themselves to feed blood to their young. They give them fish — sometimes regurgitated — and stuff.)

Sort-of related posts

• Teaser post: 1937's Chandler Pageant
• Historic Montoursville church is closing its doors
• Another day, another mystery ancestor photograph

Weirdest thing I'll purge this year

I'm continuing to downsize and this takes up way too much shelf space, so I posted it to my neighborhood's "free stuff" Facebook page with this note: 

Gift cemetery

For my first post on here, I promise this will be the weirdest thing I ever post and then it will be much more normal after that. This is a model cemetery that was clearly someone's art project long ago. Maybe it fits someone's aesthetic or model railroad??? It's about 8.5 inches by 12 inches. Comes with an unattached sheep that is disproportionately sized compared to the cemetery. .... Just want to see if anyone is interested because I'd hate to toss it.

If  there are no takers, I'll at least keep the sheep.

Snapshot & memories: At the Penn State computer lab

Here's a picture that someone (probably Jessica Hartshorn) took of me at a Penn State University computer lab in either 1992 or 1993. Wearing my lucky, lumpy USFL hat, I am surely working on a class paper or project for which I had been procrastinating. I was a bad student in college who didn't put much effort into most classes. Let's just say that my grade-point average would have made me a strong contender for the Cy Young Award if it were my ERA. I was a bad student because I spent most of my time at The Daily Collegian, writing, editing and/or paginating stories for the five-day-a-week student newspaper. I wanted to work in newspapers after college, so I figured that was my hands-on education. And here I am in 2026 still working for one of the dwindling number of newspapers in the United States. It didn't hurt, either, that the folks at The Daily Collegian were awesome and well worth spending endless hours newspapering with.

I have felt bad for years, though, about how little effort I put into my classes. Penn State's liberal arts curriculum offered classes on many fascinating topics that Older Chris would love to spend time on, especially in the realms of history, literature, social sciences, health and the arts. If only some of us could have had our later-in-life passion for continuing education when we were 19, 20 and 21...

I also regret that I haven't yet written much about my college days on Papergreat. When I began this blog in 2010, I was only 17 years removed from graduating from Penn State and it felt far too recent to qualify as "history." But now I wake up and it's nearly 33 years since I left Happy Valley with my diploma. I'm older than the majority of my professors were at the time they graded my low-effort papers, probably while shaking their heads (unless their graduate TAs did the grading).

And now I fear I've waited too long. My memories of Penn State are no longer crisp and detailed. They feel more like dreams I can recall if I close my eyes. I don't have a ton of ephemera from Penn State anymore to spur recollections. And I have very, very few pictures from my four years on campus, which seems bizarre but that was life before these times in which I take two dozen cat photos per day with my phone. There's this photo from my junior and senior year dormitory room (where you can also see the USFL hat in the background), and some photos from THON, but very little beyond that, until Graduation Day. I should have packed a camera for college in 1989! I can think of a hundred things I should have documented with snapshots. Sigh.

I'm going to try to do a better job in the coming months (and years?) of using ephemera as the jumping off point for telling stories about my days at Penn State. They're as worthy of preserving for posterity as postcards from 1915 or vernacular photography from 1935 or travel brochures from 1955. And those stories involve dear friends who represented the very best part of the college experience. 

Other snapshots and memories          

• Adorable little me on Mulberry Street
• Kitchen at Willow Street house in Montoursville
• Me and Pop-Pop in the kitchen
• Commodore 64 corner
• (Missing) snapshot & memories: Thanksgiving
• Me & Cyrano
• Me in a Star Trek shirt
• All kids do these days is play video games
• Posing with a Saturn V in 1982
• The Phillies are hot, and so was I
• Relocated fire engine in Montoursville
• Family outfits of 1972
• Our little bookstore
• Well-dressed for first day of nursery school

Mom's 1968 letter from Hussian School of Art

Continuing with the theme of posting about some items I came across during the sorting and decluttering of family ephemera, here's a letter that Mom (Mary Ingham Otto, 1948-2017) received from Hussian School of Art in Philadelphia in June 1968, when she was 20 years old. 

This would have been after she left Lycoming College. One year after this, in June 1969, she married my father. And another 1½ years after that, in December 1970, I was born. So I really don't know for sure how Mom's second year at Hussian School of Art unfolded. I know she was extremely talented and rightfully proud of her art skills, which included sketching and sculpture. I posted a few of her pieces here shortly after her death in 2017. Excellent works, but I don't know if those few pieces show the extent of her talent. Most of her artwork is in my sister Adriane's possession.

Hussian School of Art had opened in July 1946. According to Wikipedia, "John Hussian, a member of Philadelphia's art community and a renowned lecturer, was encouraged by what is now the Philadelphia Museum of Art to open a school for veterans returning from World War II."

It changed its named to Hussian College in 2015, but then abruptly closed in the summer of 2023. Beth Shapiro, who had been director of the college's bachelor of fine arts program, told The Philadelphia Inquirer, “It is heartbreaking for these students who have put all this time and energy in." 

A nifty Gritty fiddlin' on the roof, saved for posterity

A just want to share this for posterity because it's awesome-sauce and I want to do my tiny bit to help it never get lost.

On Feb. 5, Joshua Raclaw skeeted: "We put on an all-Yiddish community production of fiddler on the roof in Philadelphia and cast member and local artist Sofie Rose Seymour created the most amazing show poster that ever was."

On Instagram, the artist added:

This production of Fidler Afn Dakh was a labor of love, put on by a community of folks with a range of prior theater experience (including none!) and prior Yiddish experience (including none!) who got together and made something impossibly beautiful and unlikely and special

For a little while, there was a shtetl called Anatevke alive in West Philly, where you could hear a whole world in Yiddish, ful mit harts, with queer and diasporic and Jewish joy and grief and love

I made this poster as a thank you gift for our director Isy and music director Tim, who gekholemt a kholem that we’d put this crazy thing together in a month, and for our cast & musicians, who were crazy enough to do it

***

We must preserve and heartily support the arts and history and all cultures and the incredible creative output of human beings. 

Mid-century New Jersey election ephemera

Here's a 75-year-old piece of election ephemera. I'm not even sure where it came from. It urges voters to vote "yes" on the school bond issue and "Elect Experienced Executives" Brace Eggert, Julius C. Engel, James C. Forgione, Martin J. O'Hara and Russell B. Walker.

I say I don't know where this ephemera came from because it's apparently for an election near Stephenville, New Jersey, located in the northern part of that state. There are no family connections to that area that I'm aware of.

I'm sure it's Stephenville (or an enclosing municipality) because all five of these guys show up in the sprawling Wikipedia entry for Stephenville, which goes into massive detail about the political goings-on there in the middle of the 20th century. Forgione was at one point the mayor of the former Raritan Township that became Edison Township in 1954. The other four were township commissioners, with Walker being chairman of the health board. There was much drama over local development and especially issues with septic tanks and the sewer system. The section of the Stephenville Wikipedia page that merely covers the years 1948 through 1953 is nearly 5,000 words. I might suggest it only if you suffer from insomnia. You'd have much more fun with Papergreat's large category of Ruth Manning-Sanders posts.

Book cover: "Big Freeze"

Much of the United States has been suffering through a big freeze in recent days, but it's already 80 here in the Sonoran Desert. We have gnats and dust.

• Title: Big Freeze
• Author: Bellamy Partridge (1877-1960). I was absolutely positive that I'd featured him on Papergreat before, most likely for his 1958 book on the history of auctions, Going, Going, Gone! But I was wrong. Huh.
• Dust jacket illustrator: Paul Galdone (1907-1986)
• Book design: Maurice Serle Kaplan
• Publisher: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company
• Publication date: 1948
• Pages: 236
• Format: Hardcover
• Dust jacket price: $2.75 (the equivalent of about $38 today)
• Dust jacket expert: "Bellamy Partridge's new historical novel tells a dramatic story of old New York, when the city was a small but cocky town of a mere quarter million. It was in 1832 that David Wakeman, a young engineer just out of college, passed through the city when hordes of people fleeing the cholera scourge were streaming to the country. On his way to Philadelphia — to take a job on the new aqueduct — David was appalled at the sight of the panicky fugitives, for he was convinced, as many were not, that it was the medieval system of wells which so many cities still used for their water supply that was spreading the deadly infection. When, in time, New York came round to his way of thinking, David was called back to carry to completion the work on the Croton reservoir and aqueduct."
• Dedication: "This book is dedicated to HELEN my researcher and collaborator, my wife, and still my friend"
• Excerpt from "A Word to the Reader": "In writing this novel I have had access to the century-old collection of books, manuscripts, records, documents, and diaries belonging to the American Institute. Back in the days when New York was a small town — small in the sense of having none of the utilities and modern conveniences which make city life worth the living — the Institute was a great power for progress and improvement, and for a way of life it called The American Plan. Among the ambitious aims of the Institute was a determination to get an adequate water system into New York City; for even after the population of the place had passed a quarter of a million, New Yorkers were still pumping water from their own wells and cisterns. The only plumbing they possessed was in the back yards. Almost inevitably there was a big water fight which lasted for years; but the library of the Institute was, so far as I know, the only organization which compiled a fairly complete record of these hostilities."
• About the protagonist: Of David Wakeman, Partridge writes: "The plot ... concerns the love affairs of an imaginary young engineer I have called David Wakeman. That I have ascribed to David a large part of the credit and responsibility for building the Aqueduct was a matter of necessity as well as convenience."
• Excerpt from 1948 review by Charles Lee in The New York Times: "The plumbers will hail Mr. Partridge for serving, in a sense, as their laureate in this oblique tribute to their essential place in modern society. Aqueducteers ought to drink his health in the vital liquid of their profession. And readers with a touch of old-fashioned conscience and a taste for somewhat lavendered narrative and poeticized justice will give him their huzzahs. This reader must put it on the record, however, and with full appreciation of the story's simple charms, that 'Big Freeze' is not top-shelf Partridge. Some interesting historical footnotes are worked into the text, but the story is thin and slow, and the characterization trite."
• Related reading: An in-depth November 2019 Smithsonian Magazine article by Jonathan Schifman is headlined "How New York City Found Clean Water." It details the long process that led to the building of the Croton Aqueduct. It fears Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, among many other figures, and covers some of the same ground as Partridge's novel.  

A nice gig for your mid-70s

Continuing with items I came across during the recent sorting and decluttering of family ephemera, here's a letter that my great-grandfather, Howard Horsey "Ted" Adams (1892-1985), received in August 1968 to confirm a post-retirement consultant position with The Welsbach Corporation of Philadelphia. I hope to write more about Welsbach and my great-grandfather's work there at some point (add it to the list, right?). For now, suffice to say that he was an electrical engineer and in the late 1960s Welsbach was still involved with electrical construction and infrastructure contracts.

The contract was for $6,000 and was set to begin on October 1, 1968, a few weeks after Howard's 76th birthday. It included having an office at his disposal and required that he be available to the chairman of the board for consultation on company matters. Today's equivalent of $6,000 is about $56,500, so this was a pretty lucrative gig atop my great-grandfather's retirement plan and other savings. Having specialized expertise was valued and paid well! Somehow I don't foresee anyone retaining me as a consultant for journalism or copyediting matters if and when I reach age 76.