Ancestors
I've never had more than a passing interest in genealogy in general, but I've occasionally wondered about my ancestors. Several years ago, when I was returning from a backpacking trip in the Wind River Range of Wyoming with a friend, we had some time to kill in Salt Lake City. There are lots of things to do in Salt Lake, but the sights that are unique are things like the Mormon Tabernacle and Temple. (We were allowed in the Tabernacle, but not the Temple, since neither of us was a Mormon.) We also visited the Mormon genealogy library, which has the most comprehensive database and archives in the world, and is open to the public. Anyone who is really into genealogy should know to go to this place. We fiddled around for a couple of hours there, but it was rather complex and intimidating, and I didn't find anything on my ancestors. They were still using microfiche, but were working to computerize everything. I would have to depend on relatives to fill me in.
I also picked up a free Book of Mormon somewhere during that trip, and I added it to my collection of religious texts from around the world. It's a long book, so there is a lot to read, if you're a student of theology like me. I found the whole saga fascinating. But that's another story and I'm off track - back to my ancestors...
Since I was the first person in my extended family to earn a college degree, I was the first "white-collar" worker in the bunch. That didn't make me better than anyone else, it was just a natural fit for my talents and interests. My parents generation, including many aunts and uncles, all worked at jobs that could be described as "blue-collar." Some of them may have been happier doing other things requiring more education, but they didn't have the same opportunities I had. And going back another generation, I'm not sure what you would call subsistence farmers, but since my grandfather wore overalls, maybe he could be described as a "no-collar" worker.
My mother's family as far back as I know is from East Texas. I liked visiting my grandparents when I was little, since it was so different from anything else I had ever seen. My grandfather was mostly a farmer, and he and my grandmother lived in a little frame house in the country next to my great grandmother's traditional old farmhouse, with its high pitched corrugated metal roof, tall ceilings, and oak clapboard siding. There were chickens running loose in the yard, dogs sleeping under the porch and corn growing in the fields. They had added a bathroom to the house at some point, but they had no air conditioning or central heat like I was used to. In summer, the place to be was out on the porch in a rocking chair in the heat of the day. In winter, there was only a propane fired space heater to huddle around in the living room to keep warm. On Sunday afternoons, we would watch wrasselin' on the television, and my grandmother would just squeal when the bad guy would get the body slam and the head stomp by his opponent.
My grandmother had a ringer washing machine on the back porch by the time I was a kid, no doubt a recent step up from a washtub and washboard. I thought it was the neatest thing feeding clothes through the ringers to squeeze the water out. Of course the only way clothes were dried then was hanging on a line, out in the sun. I was too short to help with that chore.
Like everything else there, food was an adventure. There was always fresh milk from the milk cow in the refrigerator in a gallon jar, but it didn't taste like what I was used to, so I wouldn't drink it. There was another gallon jar of chilled water from the shallow well in the refrigerator also, as much to let the iron sediment settle as to keep it cold. You had to pour the water slowly to avoid stirring up that red layer at the bottom. For breakfast, there were always eggs, which we kids liked to go gather from the henhouse, and fresh biscuits. The older people made a blend of peanut butter and ribbon cane syrup to put on their biscuits, but I never found a taste for ribbon cane and opted for homemade jelly instead. When the dirty dishes were cleared away to wash, any uneaten food was left on the table and covered with a cloth, awaiting the next meal. At lunch, there might be most anything, but there were always beans, since my grandfather loved them. Maybe that's what kept him healthy. For meat, there was usually something I recognized but there was sometimes wild game, like squirrel, as well. Once again, leftovers after lunch would be covered with the cloth and kept for dinner. It seemed to me as if my grandmother practically lived in the kitchen. If she wasn't cooking, baking some desert, or washing dishes, she was shelling purple hull peas or putting up some vegetable or other. She was always smiling.
When we
were visiting overnight or longer, I usually stayed with my great
grandmother next door in the older house, which had no indoor plumbing. We
would have to go to an outhouse out back to use the bathroom, and we took a
bath in the evening in a big double washtub under a giant pecan tree in the
yard. She had a washstand with a pitcher and basin for washing hands and
face in the house. If we were there at the same time, my cousin and I would
be assigned to sleep on a big iron bed that was so tall we had to climb into
it. The mattress sloped toward the center from all directions, so it was
impossible to keep from sliding together as we slept. In summer, we would
wake up too hot and have to pull our way back over to the edges. We thought
it was just grand.
Everything about my grandfather was old-timey to me. He never learned to read or write, but he had memorized how to make his name, which must have been more like drawing a picture to him. He would smoke one or two cigarettes a day, hand rolled of course. He'd sprinkle the tobacco from a can onto the paper, then roll it up and lick the edge to seal it all together. Sometimes I would watch him shave in the morning with a straight razor out on the back porch using a wash basin, and I could never figure out how he kept from cutting his face.
My grandfather seemed to always be working on something and rarely sat around. He farmed with a mule and plow until just before he died in his early eighties. He let me try holding the plow once, but I couldn't make the mule go like he could. For that matter I couldn't make the cow's milk come out either. I would have needed a lot more training to be a farmer. My grandfather never owned a tractor, but he did have an old car that one of my uncles had given him, though I don't think I ever saw him drive it. Instead, he would rather hitch up a horse to a wagon which had been converted to rubber tires to make it safe for paved roads. Sometimes he would take us kids into town in the wagon if we begged long enough.
I suppose by our modern materialist standards, my maternal grandparents had almost nothing, and would have been considered dirt poor. But the funny thing is, they always seemed content. Their life wasn't easy, but what they had was theirs, and having little money just wasn't a big deal. They had lots of kids and grandkids to come visit. Even after my grandmother lost both legs to diabetes, she never quit smiling. Maybe she had figured out what is important in life.
I don't know as much about my father's family, since his father came from California, from a family that had deep roots in Santa Rosa north of the bay area. I never met any of them, since we couldn't drive that far on vacation. Around the time of WWI, my paternal grandfather was in the US Army Air Service working on and flying biplanes. I remember my grandmother showing me his old uniforms and medals once, which she kept packed away in a big old trunk. He met her in Houston, where she had gone to work, while he was stationed at Ellington Field. Since she didn't want to leave East Texas, when they got married they moved back here and bought some land, farming some and trying to get by like everyone else. My great grandmother in California sent enough money to keep the family here from starving during the Great Depression.
My grandfather died fairly young, before my father was even grown, probably of liver failure of some sort, but my grandmother lived up into her eighties. When I was a kid, she would go to Dallas for long stretches to stay with her sister and work as a seamstress in a garment factory, then come back home for awhile. When the garment business dried up and moved abroad, she did alterations for people in her home, working well up into her seventies. She kept up with the times pretty well, getting central heat and eventually air conditioning in her house as those became available. She even upgraded to color television from black and white finally. She was a fixture at family events, and if you could get her talking about the old times, she would just shake with laughter as she remembered things that were serious at the time, but seem funny all these years later. I suppose an important part of surviving hard times is keeping your sense of humor and optimism intact.
The house M and I built, where we raised our children, is on the same land that my grandparents bought so long ago. It has become completely forested now, though the old terraces are still there, like long runs made by a giant mole, spaced apart every hundred feet or so, an artifact of soil conservation efforts when the entire place was row crop farmed. It has been a great place to raise kids for three generations now.
Some day our grandchildren and great grandchildren will wonder about their
ancestors. Maybe we'll leave them a better record - just in case they're
interested.
6/25/03
Last Update 4/3/04