Treasuring – and Treasure IN – Your Family

Heh; one of the fringe benefits of a having a blog with no readers is that nobody notices when you're away for a while. If I had an ego worth noting, that plain fact would wound it. Yet, instead, for me it means… no pressure to crank out copy.

These last few weeks have seen me happily busy at copying and translating information on my family's history… making me, essentially, your average, armchair, genial genealogist, I suppose. Till just the last couple days, my attention's been entirely on my father's side of the tree, scaling the huge 400-plus-page resource of a volume Dad's cousin – a real, lifelong genealogist – printed privately in Germany in 1989.

There aren't too many skeletons in the closet (I might tell you sometime, though, about an ancestor whose brother murdered their sister and widowed mother… on Hallowe'en, 1601). There aren't any blindingly great saints, either – mostly just plain folks, as plain folks say… but there are still touching stories.

For instance, there's the sad note that in 1784, one young Johanna was killed when the carriage she was riding in overturned. She was not quite twenty-four, and engaged to be married. There are mothers dying young, babies buried, sons gone off to war and never returning.

One sweet story recounts how in 1684, her hometown burning down, teenaged Sophie was robbed of a treasured little prayer-book by a soldier (hired to guard, not plunder?). Unsurprisingly, the soldier had no use for it, so he gave the book to his commanding officer. The officer, in turn, gave it to his brother, a (Lutheran) seminary-student. Shortly after his appointment as pastor, he was visiting a more-veteran minister, whose widowed daughter was there with her two children. The daughter was astonished to recognize the book – she was Sophie, of course, some years older now. And the next June, she and the new pastor married… and she got her book back, too.

There are lighter-hearted moments as well, of course. The genealogist's German is very dry, strictly factual, delineates basic details and moves on. He almost never steps in with a personal note, other than in two or three instances when he's sharing his recollection of his grandmother and grandfather.

I mentioned here, years ago, his moan over a church official who'd used the church's seventeenth-century registry book's pages (with their irreplaceable information on births and baptisms and weddings and so on)… to light his pipe.

He – the genealogist, not the smoker – also grumbled of another pastor (1740s-70s) whose handwriting in his church's registry-book was "the most terrible of all pastors'". Have you seen eighteenth-century German handwriting? Here's a sample:

 

…and that's fairly clearly written. Classic German script quickly begins to look like so much Pitman or Cyrillic… brother! My father's papers include a good number of pages just as indecipherable… so my heart's with our late genealogist – badly-written German has got be keeping a lot of Augenärzte in business.

Anyway, I wanted to get back to the topic of rationalism here, after a look also at neoliberal capitalism… so let me wrap up this detour (arguably, not too tightly).

Right in time for St. Patrick's Day Friday, I began at last to dig into and outline information from my mother's side of the family, based on info sent her by her cousin some years ago. And, begorrah, there are the Irish she's always been understandably proud of. They came over to the U.S. in the 1840s (and some several decades earlier), one group tarrying awhile in Nova Scotia, and others landing directly in New York and Massachusetts.

What a find!

So I spent two days writing up a 20-plus-page document, summarizing about seven generations of that Irish / French / Scottish side, and drawing up a nicely colored Excel-based family tree for us more visual folks, and sent them over to sister Alicia, who – years ago – had herself drafted a tree, with Mother's help, as a school project. She'd asked me to look for it, and I saw it once in Mother's papers a while back, but lost it; it's still there, but till it rises to the top again… these two documents will tide her over nicely.

I'd gotten into Mother's papers in the first place, just a few weeks ago, when our (other) sister Mew asked me to track down her baby photos from mumble years ago. It was in the two-week process of going through (and organizing) Mother's letters and photos and articles, that I found her cousin's genealogical work – and baby Mew's photo.

That had become important, because – as of less than a month ago – Mew is now a grandmother, and our mother a great-grandmother… and, yep, baby Leila at a few days old looks just like her grandmother did.

I first got to translating my dad's family-history book because no one else in this family, on this side of the Atlantic, can read and understand German (American-born Mother being the other exception) – and there was stuff in that book that deserved not to be bound up (pardon the pun) in that book, but released and shared with the rest of the family; be treasured.

Well, the same is true of my mother's own trove. Here's Hubert Humphrey photographed from maybe a dozen feet away; there's grinning WWII Pacific-Theater ace Joe Foss (probably) in leather cap and flight jacket. There's Eleanor Roosevelt at a local DuPont wedding…

Mother had taken the Humphrey photo in the sixties, and years earlier interviewed then-young senator JFK, among many paths boldly crossed in her long journalism career. Her oldest of three brothers (all since deceased), flyboy colleague of airman Joe, took the Foss and Roosevelt pictures. Much, much later, their brother, Xavier, wrote up a fun recollection of that event… and, with at least two different takes of the then- First Lady, that writeup's in Mother's papers.

So I pulled a copy out of her files, and brought it to her this evening to read before bedtime; she was totally engrossed in the recollection when I left.

It's never too late, and never too soon, to take the treasure out of the dusty chests, bring it into the light of day and cool of evening, and enjoy it. Blow off the dust; share the wealth – that's the real reason it's there.