07/05/2026

Caving and Heritage

I took my girlfriend to one of my favorite caves. It's place just south of town where a creek enters a cave. The Mississippian era limestone here is capped by sandstones, limiting the cave development. That said, this cave has wonderous 100 foot tall ceilings and can be walked through. It's a lovely beginner cave that has a ton of side areas for more adventurous cavers. The most beautiful part though was the mist hanging in the middle of the trees where the cool cave air was contacting the heat wave air. We were intending to bring friends here to swim but my girlfriend doesn't think this is the best place because it requires more hiking and climbing than she thinks some of our friends can manage.

I've also been doing some genealogy on my family. The bad news is I'm so English that I've been preemptively banned from most archaeological sites. However, my great great grandma was a flapper who rode a motorcycle and married an immigrant named Octavian. Octavian was from the Austro-Hungarian Empire so the good news is that I'm probably at least 10% less English than I otherwise might be. The problem is that the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke up into like nine different countries so I don't actually know which one he is from.

I'm feeling super emotionally disconnected and disenfranchised from American culture so I was hoping to learn something about my heritage and find another culture I could explore and learn about. I've consulted with some people who know more about genealogy than I do and they suspect he is Northern Italian? I really don't know enough to challenge that. The issue is really that people in the early 1900s didn't really care what immigrants were telling them and the paperwork is all super sloppy. Like, some of his records have Australia on them because of how lazy people were. I hope I can figure it out but I have my doubts.