A Passion for Family History

Rachel Hayward

Native Roots and Family Stories Inspire Rachel Hayward's Passion to Uncover her Family History and to use her Writing Talents to Record What She has Been Told, and What She Will Find...

I have a passion for family history. It started with my visits to both set of grandparents in Astoria as a child, experiencing large family meals around round tables, stories flying, jokes and belly laughs so long and deep we were sore the next day. We shared and passed along family heirlooms, identified pictures, and then heard more stories. Those memories are still thick in my blood, and I still dream about the roads leading up to those homes, certain rooms, certain objects, smells.

I want to know more about my family and where they come from. I want to know where my brother gets his chin, and why I have the same grit and perseverance as my great grandfather. I want to know how I am related to the Chinook Indian Nation, and why so many of our lines lead back to Ireland. I want to know if we truly are related to Betsy Ross as family rumors tell, and if our Rubens line truly links back to the man who created the Rubenesque style of paining. I want to know who I am, this culmination of generations of ancestors.

Not long ago, I started researching….going through boxes of pictures with my parents and grandparents to identify them, attending family reunions, taking genealogy classes, putting together a family newsletter—doing all I could to get our ancestors’ stories. Finding details and the far-reaching family lines jazzes me. I get so geeky excited when a puzzle piece falls into place and I’m lead to another person or generation.

What I have found to be even more important are the stories. Not only do I know names, dates, and places, I also know snippets about who these people were and how they lived. My great grandfather, a very able fisherman who had a large piece of land in Astoria, died from sepsis because he stabbed his finger with a fishing hook. Chief Comcomly of the Chinook people greeted Lewis and Clark at the mouth of the Columbia, and I am a descendant of him and one of his nine wives. My grandmother made a famous recipe - Tamale Pie -  based on what was in her head, and the recipe was recorded on paper only a few years ago. I learned how to make gillnets from my grandfather, holding the wooden needles made from apple wood, and hearing my mother tell me one of her jobs was filling those needles for granny. On a recent trip to Fort Stevens, my mother shared a story about sneaking out at night to go swimming in large tanks of water on the military base, only to discover right then that they were cable testing tanks for the underwater mines placed in the Columbia to ward off enemy ships during World War I. My grandmother, whose parents came from Norway, mentioned a special gift of sight that all the women in her line had had, yet elaborated no further. An entire culture just two generations out, cloaked in mist, never understood, never spoken of, lost.

I live close to the land and nature and have a healthy respect and reverence for the earth and for life. I get that from my ancestors. I have grit and ingenuity and creativity, and I use those in tough times, just like most of my family did in days past. I live simply, with sparks of “holy cow!” thrown in at random. Mealtimes are times of gathering, warmth, food, stories, laughter, and discussion, reminding me of those dinners at Grandma’s house around the round table.

Thing is, passing these stories along is important. How else will my children understand who came before them? How else will they know how their ancestors moved, what choices they made and what mistakes they can learn from? Understanding those who came before us allows us to understand who we are. And who we’re not. It gives rise to memory, history, experience. It gives us a place in the flow of things.

Stories give an accounting. They are witnessed, heard, sung, retold, written. Stories are living things - beings that traverse time and space, whispering teachings and guidance, inspiring, validating, commiserating, communing. They can be ugly, bent, spitting at you with vile words and feelings. But worse than that, the story that is extinguished by the untelling is the greatest tragedy. So much is lost.

That is why I do this work. To make known our stories so that they may live and be told.

Excerpt from Rachel's writings:

Warmed with robe and slippers, the marble doorknob is cold to the touch. It too creaks, and I wonder just how old things are here. The bed creaks, the floor creaks, the door creaks, the dresser creaks…it’s like the language old things speak. I slip down the narrow stairs, lined with a flowered runner, and open the door to the hall that leads into the kitchen.

I am met with a barrage of comfort: grandma at the stove managing pancakes, eggs, bacon, biscuits, ham, giving me a big smile and a tea cup with my wished-for coffee; grandpa’s clocks all tick-tocking, and at each quarter hour, chiming or cuckooing; the hum of conversation in the other room where grandpa, uncles, aunts, cousins, and parents are already awake, chatting and reading newspapers.

Why Write your Family History?

 

My Great Grandparents, Grandmother, Great Aunts

Have you written your Family History?

        by Camille Cole

My sister teaches second grade. Not long ago she asked her students to write a short piece about their family. To her surprise, most of them, most of these seven year-olds did not know much of anything about their families. Some did not even know who was their dad, much less who were their grandmother and grandfather, aunts, and uncles. One child, for example, lives with mother and step-father and isn’t clear who is their father. Mother is pregnant with her boyfriend. There are step-siblings, there are half-siblings. You get my drift.

Back in the day, our day, we had a mother and a father, aunts and uncles; we had two sets of grandparents. When we went to grandmother’s house, she told us about when she was a child, about the olden days. Letters were written and saved throughout generations. History was passed along through these stories and letters, letters that had been saved from previous generations. We can go on Ancestry dot com and find a simple history through census records, letters, and other records that have been recorded and saved.

Today, emails and texts are passed back and forth. That’s how we communicate.  I can tell you as a technologist, those communiques will be long gone, inaccessible within the next ten years. We hop from version to version of Windows and Mac OS, and by the time our grandchildren are searching for clues about their family history, that documentation will be nothing but the remnants of ether, an Internet of the past. Same goes for our digital photo albums.

Will family history mean less to future generations than it does today? Perhaps. Or, it will simply be harder to find. As a matter of fact, it won’t exist. There will be no letters, fewer family albums that make sense, fewer stories that have been written on paper and passed from generation to generation.

When I was writing my family history, The Brass Bell, I ran into difficulties when going through photo albums, organized carefully by my grandmother and great aunts. All those heart wrenching pictures of young children and young adults were left for my generation to decode with little or no documentation. They left the pictures, but forgot to label them with names, places, and dates. How frustrating! But they exist.

So 50 years from now, what will our descendants have available to tell them the story of those who came before? All the pictures and all the stories and all the correspondence will have been digital and long gone into a bucket of cyberspace that is no longer relevant.

What can be done?  Write your family story! Whatever you know—however you want to tell what you know, be it an essay that covers what your grandmother has told you, or your mother, or an uncle. Perhaps you can write a memoir or a narrative non-fiction book about an interesting person or story you know about your family or a person in your family.

Two years ago I wrote an account of my family—the story of my Great Aunt Marion who started a school house in a chicken coop in my great grandfather’s cherry orchard. The name of my book is The Brass Bell. If you would like to see how I took one woman and her story and left a trace of my family history, you can access my book on Amazon, or through my publisher, Sahalie Publishing.

Sure, I’m trying to promote my book. I put a lot of work into it.  But I also want to encourage anyone who understands what I’m saying to write what you know down. It doesn’t have to be published. There are a lot of options, but write what you know, what has meaning to you and relevance for future generations. It might be as simple as a story about an uncle who ran a dairy farm. Fifty or one-hundred years from now, they won’t know what that meant. The most important thing to understand is that if we don’t write something down and print it out and save it, our family’s story is forever lost. Our society and our culture as we know it today and as we have been told about the past, will be gone like dead leaves on a maple tree in October. They are beautiful fill us with emotion and then they are gone.

If you purchase The BrassBell from the Sahalie website, mention this article and you will get free shipping plus a 10% discount on the book. This book is one example of how it can be done.  You can also write a memoir, a short essay of one thing about you or your family that has meaning to you, or a collection of essays. I kept a blog while I was researching and writing the book, and I found this helpful in all kinds of ways....people came forward with information; later they purchased the book.  

 Print out your documents and file them away. The paper will last longer than your digital documents.

The Gift of a Family Tree

Tips on Creating a Large Family Tree Template as a Gift for Family Members

Suzie Kolber, creator of ObituariesHelp.org offered to provide my readers with some tips and templates for creating a large family tree to give as a gift. Here is what she has to say:

A large family tree framed and presented as a gift is a wonderful way to honor a person. It is the ideal choice for a milestone birthday or anniversary and has a lot of meaning. It can be difficult to choose the right template with so many options. The right one for your family may be different from what would work for someone else.

 

Consider Presentation

Since the family tree will most likely be prominently displayed, it should have a nice visual presentation. A circular family tree provides a continuous, symmetrical design that looks nice when framed. A fan is another option that appears like a piece of artwork when hung.

Another choice is the bowtie family tree chart if you want to include both sides of a family member. This is ideal for anniversaries where you would feature the married couple in the center and branch off for both of their families. Since there will be a lot of information or a long list of names, you want the shape to stand out even if someone doesn't take the time to read the words.

Consider Information

To choose the right template for your gift, you have to consider how much information you want to include. This will influence the selection as to which style works best. If you only plan to include photos or a name and birthdate, a family tree with oval spaces will look nice. If you want more information included such as birth, marriage and death dates, lines or boxes will be more practical.

The landscape and pedigree styles are the most traditional. They can hold a lot of information in a way that is easy to follow. If you are giving this gift to a couple who did not have children, you may want to use a partner family tree. It allows you to trace the history on both sides of the family with the couple as the starting point.

Keep these tips in mind when designing a family tree print as a gift:

• ·         Choose a template that doesn't have a lot of holes that are glaringly obvious – you don't want to highlight missing people or unusual circumstances that may make people uncomfortable

• ·         Remember that your family tree chart doesn't have to be an 8x11 piece of paper; it can be as large as you need it to be to fit the information

• ·         Consider making it vibrant with a colored background but choose a shade that doesn't take away from the information or make it difficult to read

• ·         Find free templates online and try out different ones – you only know when something works once you see it

A family tree chart is a fabulous gift that many people will appreciate. It is a gift from the heart and one that is personal to the recipient but that others can enjoy. Be willing to play with different styles to find the one that fits your needs. 

Suzie Kolber

Suzie created ObituariesHelp to be the complete online resource for “do it yourself” genealogy projects, where you can find printable templates of all kinds and sizes.

The site is a not for profit website dedicated to offering free resources for those that are trying to trace their family history.

Chronicling Family History

Great Great Aunt Mary

If you’re lucky enough to have a family association or members of your family who have kept archives and records, you will be able to dig up stories about many generations past. The following is based on information I found in a book written about my Parsons Family, on a narrative written by my Great Aunt Martha about her childhood, a journal kept by my Great Aunt Marion, and on the many stories about the “Olden Days” told to me as a child by my Grandmother and her two sisters, Marion and Martha. Perhaps this will inspire my readers to write their own, either for publication or for your great, great, great grandchildren. They will be grateful if you do.

Dateline: Worthington, Massachusetts, January 25, 1865, my Great, Great, Great Grandfather, Maurice Parsons, wrote: “My first nine children have all except one been teachers of primary schools, and I believe very successful in their occupation.” His Great Granddaughter and my Great Aunt, Marion Parsons, upheld the Parsons tradition in the years to come, turning a hen house in her father’s cherry orchard into one of the highest-ranking schools in New York State. (I would write a book about this 150 years after Maurice wrote those words and call it The Brass Bell.)

At the time Maurice Parsons wrote the letter, his eldest son, Edwin (my great, great grandfather) had left Worthington for Syracuse, New York, where he taught school for a while before taking up farming full-time. Having saved his money, he was able to purchase property and marry his love, Julia Armstrong, in September, 1846. They had six children, and as these children came of age, the farm grew in size. Their sons had inherited their father’s love for making a living off the land. Their eldest daughter, Mary Amelia, married James Schuyler Jerome, a cousin of Jenny Jerome who had left the country for England where she married Lord Churchill. They had a son named Winston.

In the spring of 1890, my Great Grandfather, Willis Parsons, the youngest of Edwin and Julia’s sons purchased a sixty-some acre farm just up the road from the family farm. The road back then was a dirt turnpike connecting Eastern and Western New York State. Over time, Willis added another 138 acres to his holdings and became one of the most respected fruit growers in the state. All along the Turnpike there were the farms of cousins, aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers, creating a widespread community of Parsons and Jerome relations. Though Willis dedicated his life to farming, serving as long-time President of the New York State Fruit Growers Association, the family regard for the importance of education was intact.

Children and grandchildren—including Willis’s three daughters, Grace, Marion, and Martha—attended school every day, in blizzard or sticky heat, at a small one-room schoolhouse donated by cousin Guy Parsons. Though the school eventually became part of the local public school system, the day came when the old school could no longer hold the children or keep them warm during the frigid winters. Several of the Parsons and Jerome families opened their parlors for classes. When the Parsons girls finished school, Willis Parsons insisted his daughters attend college, become teachers.

By and by, the people of the farm community that came to be known as Westvale were wise enough to look into the future and see where the industrial revolution was heading. They knew that in order for their children to be successful in the changing world that lie ahead—the two-lane dirt turnpike had been paved and horse drawn buggies were replaced with fancy buggies that motored themselves—only the best of educations would serve their off-spring and save their community.

Marion Parsons returned to Westvale after college and after teaching for a year in a rugged frontier town in Washington State, and people in the community came to her and asked if she would consider starting a new school to serve their growing numbers.

Though she had loved her travels out west—the trip back home on the train through California, her voyage to Catalina Island on a glass-bottom boat—Marion recognized and honored her duty. That summer she approached women who were picking fruit in her father’s orchards and asked if they would help her clean up an old chicken coop near the cherry orchard

A local judge and an attorney joined Willis and other members of the extended family to form a school board. They helped raise money, donated property, and lay the legal and financial groundwork for what would become the Cherry Road School. On its first day of school, Marion was presented with the brass bell from the old schoolhouse. Tears sprung to her eyes as she held the bell whose resounding clang had once signaled her and her sisters, cousins and friends to the long wooden benches in a tiny one-room school. As she raised the bell for the first time, she could not have imagined that nearly 100 years later, Cherry Road School would be the alma mater of thousands who would remember her fondly as Miss Parsons, their first and greatest hero.

If you would like to purchase a copy of The Brass Bell, it’s available through Sahalie Publishing:

http://www.sahaliepublishing.org/Brass-Bell-order.html