Family Business

A few years ago, I was in college working towards degrees in history that would enable me to reach my long-term goal of teaching history at the collegiate level. As with any other degree program, there is a laundry list of required courses but there are also some elective course requirements too. Going into college I had determined that whenever possible, I would take an elective course that held some interest to me or made sense, rather than just taking the easiest class that I could get away with to meet the requirement and get the credits.

           I took electives like Personal Finance, Public Speaking and Nutrition. In my way of thinking, classes like these would provide much more benefits over the course of my life and were worth sitting through a few boring lectures from time to time. There was one elective that I really had an interest in and was finally able to make it fit into my schedule, Genealogy.

           Where the idea or interest in researching my family history came from, I have no idea. I just know that at some point, I had decided that I would like to learn as much as I could about my family history. I only knew the basics, things like where each side of my family was originally from and general locations of where my grandparents had grown up and a few other tidbits. My research might have been easier had my grandparents been alive when I had made my decision however, that was not the case. All four of them had passed, the longest living had been gone for nearly a decade now.

           The task of tracing ones’ heritage can be daunting. I felt that the best way to approach it was to concentrate on one side of my family at a time. The problem though, was which side to begin with and where to begin. It seemed that no one in my family, as far as I knew, was very good at keeping records of important things like births, weddings, divorces, etc. so this was shaping up to be a difficult yet enlightening project. Knowing that I had very little information in-hand, I assumed that since my father’s side of the gene pool had more swimmers, I would be able to discover more information about those relatives quicker. Also, with more relatives to discover, it would be easier to figure out exactly how to go about the whole process making future searches quicker.

           In most normal situations, whatever they might be, you start at the beginning with what you know and go from there. However, when you are trying to create your family tree you have to go in reverse and the beginning is, in a way, the end. My beginning would be when my first relatives, however many great’s back that is, made the harrowing journey across the ocean to begin a new life.

           So, I did what I had learned in class. I created a plan for how I was going to conduct the research that I needed to do. What information was I looking for, where was I going to search for it, how much of my research could be conducted online versus sending requests, electronic or written, for information that was not available online.

           Getting the information for my parents, brother and sister was certainly easy enough to accomplish, as was my parent’s information. The further I expanded from my immediate family though, not only was the information slower in reaching me but it was also harder to come by.

           I was rummaging through a few old boxes that I had kept up in the attic that had been slowly consolidated into each other over the various years. I was looking for something, probably my old baseball card collection that had been misplaced, but happened to spy a few old notebooks bound together with twine. I pulled them out, momentarily distracted from my search, and opened it to see if they were worth keeping. 

           What I had inadvertently discovered were old diaries of my paternal grandmother’s. Since history was not only just a passing interest but the route with which I planned to support my future with, I was excited to read a glimpse into a time gone by.

The first diary that I had opened started out innocuous enough, detailing her love for gardening, which flowers were her favorites to grow and which fruits and vegetables she would make into jams or can for the upcoming winter. She had also included a few recipes that she had learned from her mother but would take a lot of trial and error to make and perfect now. Things were not measured as precisely back in those times so when, in the ingredients, there was a direction to add “a handful of flour”, how exactly was that measured? I’m sure that my hands were bigger than my grandmother’s and who knows, they could be twice the size of my great-grandmother.

Canning vegetables and making her own jams certainly made sense to me, as she was a product of the depression era. Anyone that I have ever met from that bygone era had at least one quality in common, make the best use of everything you have and when it is used up, save it because you never know if it might be useful again another day. I had no idea how cost-effective it was to can your own vegetables or make your own jams, but I made a mental note to look further into what was required.

           The second diary contained entries of highlights in my father’s life as well as those of his brother and sister, who are twins. There were also a few anecdotes included which made me laugh more than once. For example, there was the time that my father thought that he was old enough to teach his younger brother how to drive. Of course, the majority of the vehicles back in that time were standard. Well, my uncle wasn’t very good with a clutch at that time, for obvious reasons, and rather than releasing it slowly, he just let it go. A few jumps of the car later and the car had emerged through the front wall of the garage. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall for that explanation to my grandparents.

           Another time, my father apparently was trying to prove his engineering prowess and repair the hot water heater before my grandfather got home. He had seen and helped my grandfather before so, he was sure that he would be able to fix it easily. Things did not go easily or as planned apparently because my grandmother wrote that the basement had flooded. It was a dirt floor basement too, quite the mess it seems. Another mental note to ask my father about.

           The third and final diary contained the most revealing, and shocking, information. I discovered that at least someone in my family had been keeping a record of sorts, of my family history. I discovered that my grandmother was one of nine which, back in that age, was not exactly uncommon. My first ancestor, Seth, had come across the ocean over two hundred years ago and while it would be nice to think he had come over to build a better life, the truth was different. It seems that Seth had been a horse thief back in the homeland of Scotland and continued his thieving ways in the colonies as well.

           That, however, was not the most shocking thing that I learned about my family history that day. As I mentioned, my grandmother was one of nine brothers and sisters. Her eldest brother Eugene, ten years her senior, had not in fact joined the Navy as she had been told when he went away. Eugene, as it turned out, was a man of ill repute. My great-grandparents had told everyone that Eugene had gone out on his own, joined the Navy and was sailing the world. Where my dear granduncle had actually been was in jail, serving a long sentence for bootlegging, armed robbery and, I am sad to say, horse thievery. I can only imagine how proud Seth would have been.