Genealogy, inspired!
How do you pull together the moments of a life you’ve never glimpsed?
How do you gather random facts about kin from the ether and create a story from the fragments of the past that makes sense in the present?
I don’t know the answers to these questions but I’m trying and trusting that the process of creating each spread in my Heritage Journal is weaving bits of each ancestor’s life into the tapestry of my own being.
I know I’m not alone when I say that I had a difficult relationship with my mom.
With so many individual, familial, and societal forces at play, I’m honestly not sure our culture is set up to nurture and support our mother/daughter relationships in a very positive way, especially through the individuation years, try as we might.
And so, as I’ve sat with the Heritage Journal spread for my mom, my emotions have ebbed and flowed…
Thanks to my maternal Grandma’s writing, I know that Nancy was a Quaker and very much a “woman of her time”. She was expected to do things a certain way and expected the same of her 13 children. Which is why, when Hannah came along and didn’t exactly fall in line, she began telling her how “bold and queer” she was.
On this day…
In a timeline where a birth date
can also become a death date,
by sheer will,
stood a man determined
to make it so.
On this day…
117 years ago,
my maternal great grandparents,
William Oscar and Una June
were married in Jasper, Missouri.
William was 23,
Una was only 16.
While I’m still waiting to hear back from the Groundskeeper at the cemetery my Grandpa is buried at, I received follow up documentation the other day from the New York City Health Dept. in the form of his final medical report. It turns out our family story was correct, his immediate cause of death was…
I often wonder why it is that the people closest to us, in physical proximity and in heart space, are the ones most often taken for granted…
Why we assume we know the facts or, at the very least, have bits and pieces of facts clear enough in our heads that it’ll all come together easily and turn out just fine in the end.
I find myself currently in this liminal space with my maternal grandpa, Phil, who lived and died before I came earth side.
After years of thinking about it, I finally ordered and received my Grandpa Phil’s death certificate last week and goodness was that exciting!
Funny, isn’t it, how excited we can get about documenting our ancestors…
Seeing the details in black and white…
Reflecting on the circumstances that led up to that final moment…
Contemplating all that came before and all that transpired after?