As some of you know, my wife is working on compiling our genealogy and spends hours tracking down distant relatives on both sides and knows a lot more than most of the family about it. Most of the people were respectable, hardworking folks like farmers and machinists along with other, more highfalutin folk, like professors and such.

Of course, then there’s Great-Uncle George, who was executed in the electric chair. Well, how would we describe him? Then we were fortunate enough to come up with this obituary, “Great-uncle George occupied a chair of applied electronics at an important government institution, was attached to his position by the strongest of ties, and his death came as a great shock.”