In the linen closet

When I was a young girl, I loved to sit next to my grandmother and listen to her stories. It was on her lap that I learned to read, and first heard of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Lawrence Welk. She was a thoroughly modern Millie, and had a remote control--with a mute button!--in the 1970s. She had a disability that made walking difficult, so spent much of her time in bed or in a custom-made chair that made it easier for her to be comfortable. 

One of those mornings, she told me the story of how she was invited to christen a ship in Japan. She recounted how the Japanese didn't just have a bottle of champagne broken across the bow; they had developed a mechanism that included a silk cord that had to be cut across a block with a silver hatchet in one stroke. They provided her with a hatchet to practice, since it was purportedly bad if she failed to cut it in a single blow--sort of like birthday candles. She told of the day of the christening dawning very cold, how she was very nervous, and how it rained when she cut the cord--successfully.

Then she called to my grandfather Russell, asking him to bring her the hatchet to show me. He stepped over to the linen closet, of all places, and reached in and pulled out a beautiful presentation box, painstakingly inscribed with the date by a hand not used to the roman alphabet. Inside were nestled the hatchet, along with a section of the red and white silk cord and a cedar chopping block that showed a clean cut. 

Years later, we would find a folder of the official photographs, along with a VHS tape my uncle had made of the 5mm film that had been gifted to Jessie and Russell. It was a remarkable experience to see the event she had described that day (and many times later on as she slipped into the fog of dementia), and especially moving to see her alive and hear her voice. 

My eldest cousin James also enjoyed listening to the grandparent's stories, except he followed my grandfather around. Russell was a wiry, vital man who always seemed to be in motion--except when he sat down to watch golf. James was a budding journalist at the time, and in 1977, he sat down with our 82 year old grandfather and interviewed him about his extraordinary life, using the latest technology--audio cassette tapes. 

Shortly after my mother's death, I asked him if knew what had become of the tapes. He was in the midst of moving and preparing a book for publication (The Abolitionist's Journal) and told me he would keep an eye out for them. After the California storms of last month dropped a rather large tree on his home, he made a concerted effort to find them. Of course, it was his wife who located them--in the linen closet, of all places.

They are currently in the hands of my favorite digitizer. I'm hoping the result will contribute to these family history musings. 

The fabled hatchet in its presentation box

All the rights and privileges pertaining thereto

I have in my possession some extraordinary documents. Most of our efforts as genealogists center around locating records of birth, marriage and, death. But these are personal milestones: university diplomas.

But what makes diplomas extraordinary is not just the date--though it places them in a societal context--but also the names: my grandaunt Ella Richardson, and my mother, Madge. Both women, at a time when women did not typically earn degrees.

Ella and her sister Florence both attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, which was just a few blocks from the family home. Ella earned a BA and graduated in 1906. Seated one person away in the front row of the class picture is her sister Florence; behind them are Ella's future husband Bernard Street and his brother Claude; the four were the subjects of a double wedding the following year. In the Carletonian's senior number (edited by none other than Florence and Claude), the class picture is flanked by portraits of the valedictorian and salutatorian; Ella is the valedictorian. 

Ella went on to become a schoolteacher of German and History--until of course, she had their first child. In 1918, when she was six months pregnant with their fifth, her world fell apart when her husband was killed in a hunting accident. The family rallied around her, and she spent the next couple of years regrouping in her parent's new home in Sutherlin, Oregon. She eventually returned to Minnesota, where she lived out her days and is now buried near her dear family.

At a time when women might begin college, only to drop out once they had earned an "M.R.S." degree (witnessed by the number of wedding invitations from sorority sisters pasted in her junior year scrapbook), Madge bucked the trend. After having finished her Bachelor's in Dramatic literature from the University of California Berkeley in the early 1950s, she asked her father for support to pursue a graduate degree. He agreed, on one condition: that she prove she could support herself for a year. I recall her dexterous fingers on the typewriter (later the computer keyboard), and she told me she had had a lot of practice. She had met her father's requirement by working for a year as a secretary for Del Monte (the canned tomato folks). Satisfied, he paid for her graduate degree, this time in anthropology with a focus on ancient Egypt. Her thesis sat on a shelf next to a fat book on Hieroglyph Grammar in my childhood home. 

I keep family documents on the shelf in my office. On the wall near them hang three diplomas with my own name on them. The roots in my tree are thick with extraordinary women, and I have the documents to prove it.

Mystery dinner invitations

It's one of those interview or cocktail hour questions: If you could invite [insert number here] people, past or present, to dinner, who would you invite? Common responses are people like Albert Einstein, Johnny Cash, and even Anakin Skywalker. 

But to the family researcher, this would be an amazing opportunity. I would love to hear from my great-grandmother Julia about the love affair that brought her daughter into the world--and how she felt about that daughter finding her birth father as a grown woman. I would also ask if she actually married my great-grandfather, and what on earth they were doing having a baby in a mining town in Nevada when their lives were in San Francisco. 

I would also invite my great-grandfather, who accepted Julia, a woman with a past (and a young daughter), and gave them his name and heart. I would want to talk to him about why he split from his family in New York, how he got across the country (was he aiming for San Francisco, or is it just where he ended up?). I'd also love to know how, if he wasn't speaking to (or about) his family, did he end up with his older brother's trophy. I actually would love sitting down with the entirety of the New York Walshes, even if they might well empty my stores of whiskey. 

I think I would enjoy talking with my great uncle Vincent, who drove a flashy car, married a new-age German woman (who sang opera and penned poetry), and who left his house to his secretary, a spinster who kept the business running while he was living it up with his wife. He's also the younger brother who stepped up for his nephew when my grandfather died prematurely. As an aside, I would let him know that we share a birthday, and ask if he knew the circumstances of his birth. We'd probably share some laughs, too. Of course, I'd set the table with his wife's silver, which was passed on to me. 

I might also include my Grammie, with whom we shared meals every Sunday, and for all her commitment to family research left us precious little about her own life and family. I know she was social, and I would love to sit with her, and have her tell me who the smiling people in the group pictures were. I'd really like to ask about George, who is clearly her beau, but did not become her husband. We would use her silver, monogramed with her maiden initials on the table.

I would be beyond ecstatic to fill my weekend calendars with dinner parties for each and every one of my brick walls, but alas, that is not part of the question, and those amazing conversations will never take place. 

They say that dead men don't speak, but the fact that part of them literally forms part of us in the form of inherited DNA, does give voice to them, confirming the family lore, or exposing secrets buried over the generations. Those of us with stamped letters and envelopes sealed with a kiss and Victorian hair art will hold on to them, as they may allow our ancestors to speak once more, even if we can’t invite them to dinner.

A message from the past that may speak to us