I don't think I've blogged about this yet, but the past few weeks have been interesting ones of reconnecting to cousins I haven't seen in some time, and, in a few cases, meeting cousins I hadn't yet met. I haven't really planned for all of these meet-and-greet sessions to happen at one time. Life has simply brought them my way, all at once.
And as I think about these meetings, one thing stands out (among several): this is the way in which certain recurring themes cycle around in the folklore and received wisdom of different branches of my family. Same stories told over and over down separate lines of the family, to make the same points, to encourage the same behavior.
Several weekends ago, three cousins of mine who are sisters arranged to spend a Saturday afternoon with my aunt and me. One of these I have long known but hadn't seen since her aunt's funeral several years ago. Her two sisters have lived various places in the world, and I hadn't yet met them because their years at home didn't always coincide with mine. The three cousins are also somewhat younger than me, so I didn't meet them as I grew up--as I did many other cousins in my far-flung family network, at funerals or family reunions.
The three sisters are grandchildren of two of my mother's first cousins who married--first cousins on either side of my mother's family who married, making their progeny what we in the South call "double cousins" to my family. They arrived with a hamper full of bread, cheese, salami, crackers, wine, cake, and, with tomato soup and ham sandwiches I had put together, we had a long afternoon of nibbling, imbibing, laughing, story-telling, and, when appropriate, crying. And honeying each other to death. A family gathering, that is to say . . . .
And here's what strikes me as I think about that gathering and another similar one that took place two days ago: get members of my mother's family together, and without fail, one of things we inevitably end up talking about is how we have no choice except to help those in need. Because that's how our family has always understood we're to behave. That's what the stories we keep handing down tell us to do.
Because I'm a generation further back in the family tree than the three cousins, and because they're a bit younger than I am, I remember their great-grandparents vividly, while only one of the three sisters, the oldest, remembers her great-grandparents well. And one of the memories I was able to share with them is a memory of hearing various family members tell me that their great-grandparents, my grandmother's brother Pat and his wife Nellie, fed a number of hungry families during the Depression.
They did so because they had to do so. They had no choice. They fed hungry neighbors because it happened that, on their small farm, food was abundant, and some of their neighbors simply had no food to eat--or not enough to sustain their families, that is. And no jobs or money to buy food. And as it turned out, one of the families whose children my great-uncle and great-aunt fed in the Depression years went on to become famous in country music circles (and, we understood, people of some wealth)--a point mentioned in the stories I heard as a child for no particular reason, except to say, "Isn't it interesting that people can grow up in such misery and with such need and still find a fine niche in life?"
What I hadn't known until two days ago, when my aunt and I spent another afternoon with a set of cousins from a different branch of the same family whom we haven't seen in years, is that this pattern of feeding hungry neighbors during the Depression years wasn't limited to the particular great-uncle about whom I heard stories growing up. The cousins with whom my aunt and I spent Friday afternoon are a daughter and granddaughter of another of my grandmother's brothers, her brother Ed.
And with no prompting from me, as we started talking about family memories, my aunt's first cousin said to her, "Do you remember how during the Depression my parents used to invite people who needed food to come and eat with us?" I hadn't previously known that my great-uncle Ed and his wife Flora had also shared their table with families in need during the 1930s, or that my great-aunt, a school teacher who stayed home and raised her four children after she married, kept an eye out the window for men trudging by looking for work, who appeared to need a meal, and would peck on the window to invite them into her kitchen and fix a sandwich for them.
Nor had I known that other of my grandmother's siblings did the same. I did know that my grandmother herself had done the following: when my grandfather died just as the Depression arrived, and she was left with seven small children to feed and clothe, she took over the management of their small-town crossroads store. And as my grandfather had long done, my grandmother kept meticulous books for the store, accounts showing who charged what on any particular day, and when the customer paid towards settlement of the account.
I now have the store ledgers. And all through the 1930s, I can see, my grandmother supported various families in her town by providing food from her store gratis. I know this, because I can see with my own eyes the two columns in the ledger: one shows what went out. The other shows what came in--or, in the case of many families, what never came in as recompense for the food that went out of the store to feed these families.
I also know this because I discussed it several times with my grandmother as we pored over those old ledgers, and she noticed indignantly that my grandfather had for years supported his sister and her family--another widow with small children to raise--never receiving payment for the items he sent them from his store. And then we'd turn the page and see that, when my grandmother managed the store, she did precisely the same for several of her own family members, and seeing that, she'd have to admit with an abashed grin that her indignity at my grandfather's behavior was perhaps misplaced, since one just didn't turn away a brother or sister in need.
Or, for that matter, one didn't turn away any of the several families both black and white in their small town that simply had no means of feeding their children adequately during the Depression, like the neighbors whose children were given onion sandwiches day after day in those hungry years, and whom my grandmother made a point of feeding along with her own children, when she could corral them to her table.
I don't want any of this to sound romantic or noble or impressive. It wasn't any of that. These were ordinary people with all the foibles of ordinary people. Not one of them was either highly educated or socially prominent or affluent. My great-uncle Pat and his wife Nellie lived on a tiny, unmechanized farm whose fields I watched him plow with a hand-plow drawn by a mule even into the 1960s as he neared 90 and his death.
My great-uncle Ed and great-aunt Flora both worked hard all of their lives--Flora perhaps more than Ed, who, if I have to say so about my own flesh and blood, had an indolent streak that irritated my grandmother, his sister, profoundly. Because (though he did have a paying job and brought in a regular income) Ed's tendency to indolence meant that Flora had to work harder. And in all the years I remember this great-uncle and great-aunt, she cooked for a lunch counter in a department store in our town, though she had the credentials to be a teacher and had an exceptionally keen mind. I remember seeing her come home evening after evening from the long stint at the lunch counter's stoves and grills, her ankles and feet swollen double from the constant standing.
My grandmother certainly did not have lavish abundance to support her donations of food from her store to neighbors in need. Not long before she died, she told my mother that when the banks closed during the Depression, they kept 95 cents on every dollar she and my grandfather had saved up to that point. My grandfather died in May of 1930, leaving her with six children whose ages ranged from 16 to less than two years old, and a step-son whose mother, my grandfather's first wife, had died in childbirth.
It was not easy to feed her own children during the Depression years, let alone the children of neighbors' families. My mother often told me, as I grew up, about how her mother would take the luncheon meat from her store when it began to sour, when it had mold growing on the outside, and she would bring it home for her children to eat. She would wash the moldy outside of the bologna or salami with vinegar, to remove the mold and preserve the meat, and would wrap the stick of luncheon meat in cheesecloth soaked in vinegar for the days in which her family finished it. She and the seven children also gardened fiendishly, and the fruitful garden (my grandmother and her brothers definitely had green thumbs) was a valuable supplement to their diet during those hard years.
My grandmother was often in tears during those lean years, my mother would tell me, because she wanted her daughters to have pretty dresses to wear, but she could not afford the material for dresses that she saw in shop windows. Their nightgowns were recycled flour sacks, made more palatable with bits of lace sewn around the necks and cuffs--lace that my grandmother, her mother, and her mother-in-law had tatted. Lace that was carefully removed from an outmoded or worn-out garment, to be reused on a new one down the road . . . . When the collars and cuffs of her sons' shirts became frayed, my grandmother turned them around and sewed them back onto the shirts, so that they could be reused, other side out.
So nothing about these stories is noble or romantic. These were hard-working, ordinary people doing what they had to do to survive. And doing what they had to do when neighbors were in need. And here's why they had to do what they did for neighbors: this is one of the intriguing aspects of the recent meetings I've had with two sets of cousins on my mother's side of the family. I'm winding around to talking about the role that family stories, handed down generation after generation, can play in inculcating moral values within families.
In my recent meetings with both sets of cousins, one of the long-handed-down stories both sets of cousins repeated to my aunt and me, a story we ourselves heard constantly as we grew up, was this: when our family came to Arkansas from Ireland during the Famine years, the original Patrick (who has created such confusion for our family now that we have Big Pats and Little Pats and Uncle Pat's Pat and Uncle Ed's Pat to sort out), the original Pat, Old Uncle Pat, fed beggars.
He fed beggars because that's what you were supposed to do. He never turned anyone in need from his door, because in Ireland, no one ever turned anyone in need away from his or her door--particularly not in the years of dire hunger during the Famine, when turning away a beggar might mean the difference between life and death. Anyone who came to the door seeking help would get food and also some money from Pat and his wife Delilah, so that when Old Uncle Pat died, my grandmother remembered, people had come from miles around to dig all over his yard, thinking anyone who gave money away so freely had to have buried money around his house.
The original Pat and his wife 'Lilah also took in, according to stories handed down in all of our family lines, several orphans and raised them as their own children. I've managed to confirm the truth of those stories as an adult doing family history, because I have found the adoption papers filed in the county courthouse, with the same names I heard as a child--names of families of neighbors who, for whatever reason, were unable to raise their own children, so that Uncle Pat and Aunt Delilah took them in and raised them as their own children.
And the point of this long ramble down memory lane (and my own family's obsessive memory lane, at that, which may be of little interest to anyone else reading the rambles)? It's to note that, Isn't it remarkable how the same family stories in almost identical words can be handed down in not merely one, but in multiple, branches of the same far-flung family?
And isn't it remarkable how those stories can so shape the character of an entire family that, when you reconnect members of that far-flung family over the years, you not only hear the same stories repeated, but you find that the same traits--for instance, our obligation always to reach out to those in need--can be valued in each branch of the family?
For my part, I do find this remarkable. And it's the loss of these family networks and traditions that I mourn when I mourn--as I did following my trip several weeks ago with Steve to see his cousins in Minnesota--the loss of those family structures that sustain such long memories. And such traditions. And such reminders of our obligations to take care of those around us, to share with others the bread on our table, etc.
We lose much, when we lose all of this. Just as the cousins with whom my aunt and I spent Friday afternoon lost much two years ago when my aunt's first cousin lost her daughter at the age of 59 after that daughter's long battle with lupus--though she spent the last years of her life, knowing that death was approaching, doing everything in her power as a social worker to wheedle, cajole, and bully the state legislature of Oklahoma to take better care of the indigent, physically and mentally challenged, and homeless around the state . . . .
Several weekends ago, three cousins of mine who are sisters arranged to spend a Saturday afternoon with my aunt and me. One of these I have long known but hadn't seen since her aunt's funeral several years ago. Her two sisters have lived various places in the world, and I hadn't yet met them because their years at home didn't always coincide with mine. The three cousins are also somewhat younger than me, so I didn't meet them as I grew up--as I did many other cousins in my far-flung family network, at funerals or family reunions.
The three sisters are grandchildren of two of my mother's first cousins who married--first cousins on either side of my mother's family who married, making their progeny what we in the South call "double cousins" to my family. They arrived with a hamper full of bread, cheese, salami, crackers, wine, cake, and, with tomato soup and ham sandwiches I had put together, we had a long afternoon of nibbling, imbibing, laughing, story-telling, and, when appropriate, crying. And honeying each other to death. A family gathering, that is to say . . . .
And here's what strikes me as I think about that gathering and another similar one that took place two days ago: get members of my mother's family together, and without fail, one of things we inevitably end up talking about is how we have no choice except to help those in need. Because that's how our family has always understood we're to behave. That's what the stories we keep handing down tell us to do.
Because I'm a generation further back in the family tree than the three cousins, and because they're a bit younger than I am, I remember their great-grandparents vividly, while only one of the three sisters, the oldest, remembers her great-grandparents well. And one of the memories I was able to share with them is a memory of hearing various family members tell me that their great-grandparents, my grandmother's brother Pat and his wife Nellie, fed a number of hungry families during the Depression.
They did so because they had to do so. They had no choice. They fed hungry neighbors because it happened that, on their small farm, food was abundant, and some of their neighbors simply had no food to eat--or not enough to sustain their families, that is. And no jobs or money to buy food. And as it turned out, one of the families whose children my great-uncle and great-aunt fed in the Depression years went on to become famous in country music circles (and, we understood, people of some wealth)--a point mentioned in the stories I heard as a child for no particular reason, except to say, "Isn't it interesting that people can grow up in such misery and with such need and still find a fine niche in life?"
What I hadn't known until two days ago, when my aunt and I spent another afternoon with a set of cousins from a different branch of the same family whom we haven't seen in years, is that this pattern of feeding hungry neighbors during the Depression years wasn't limited to the particular great-uncle about whom I heard stories growing up. The cousins with whom my aunt and I spent Friday afternoon are a daughter and granddaughter of another of my grandmother's brothers, her brother Ed.
And with no prompting from me, as we started talking about family memories, my aunt's first cousin said to her, "Do you remember how during the Depression my parents used to invite people who needed food to come and eat with us?" I hadn't previously known that my great-uncle Ed and his wife Flora had also shared their table with families in need during the 1930s, or that my great-aunt, a school teacher who stayed home and raised her four children after she married, kept an eye out the window for men trudging by looking for work, who appeared to need a meal, and would peck on the window to invite them into her kitchen and fix a sandwich for them.
Nor had I known that other of my grandmother's siblings did the same. I did know that my grandmother herself had done the following: when my grandfather died just as the Depression arrived, and she was left with seven small children to feed and clothe, she took over the management of their small-town crossroads store. And as my grandfather had long done, my grandmother kept meticulous books for the store, accounts showing who charged what on any particular day, and when the customer paid towards settlement of the account.
I now have the store ledgers. And all through the 1930s, I can see, my grandmother supported various families in her town by providing food from her store gratis. I know this, because I can see with my own eyes the two columns in the ledger: one shows what went out. The other shows what came in--or, in the case of many families, what never came in as recompense for the food that went out of the store to feed these families.
I also know this because I discussed it several times with my grandmother as we pored over those old ledgers, and she noticed indignantly that my grandfather had for years supported his sister and her family--another widow with small children to raise--never receiving payment for the items he sent them from his store. And then we'd turn the page and see that, when my grandmother managed the store, she did precisely the same for several of her own family members, and seeing that, she'd have to admit with an abashed grin that her indignity at my grandfather's behavior was perhaps misplaced, since one just didn't turn away a brother or sister in need.
Or, for that matter, one didn't turn away any of the several families both black and white in their small town that simply had no means of feeding their children adequately during the Depression, like the neighbors whose children were given onion sandwiches day after day in those hungry years, and whom my grandmother made a point of feeding along with her own children, when she could corral them to her table.
I don't want any of this to sound romantic or noble or impressive. It wasn't any of that. These were ordinary people with all the foibles of ordinary people. Not one of them was either highly educated or socially prominent or affluent. My great-uncle Pat and his wife Nellie lived on a tiny, unmechanized farm whose fields I watched him plow with a hand-plow drawn by a mule even into the 1960s as he neared 90 and his death.
My great-uncle Ed and great-aunt Flora both worked hard all of their lives--Flora perhaps more than Ed, who, if I have to say so about my own flesh and blood, had an indolent streak that irritated my grandmother, his sister, profoundly. Because (though he did have a paying job and brought in a regular income) Ed's tendency to indolence meant that Flora had to work harder. And in all the years I remember this great-uncle and great-aunt, she cooked for a lunch counter in a department store in our town, though she had the credentials to be a teacher and had an exceptionally keen mind. I remember seeing her come home evening after evening from the long stint at the lunch counter's stoves and grills, her ankles and feet swollen double from the constant standing.
My grandmother certainly did not have lavish abundance to support her donations of food from her store to neighbors in need. Not long before she died, she told my mother that when the banks closed during the Depression, they kept 95 cents on every dollar she and my grandfather had saved up to that point. My grandfather died in May of 1930, leaving her with six children whose ages ranged from 16 to less than two years old, and a step-son whose mother, my grandfather's first wife, had died in childbirth.
It was not easy to feed her own children during the Depression years, let alone the children of neighbors' families. My mother often told me, as I grew up, about how her mother would take the luncheon meat from her store when it began to sour, when it had mold growing on the outside, and she would bring it home for her children to eat. She would wash the moldy outside of the bologna or salami with vinegar, to remove the mold and preserve the meat, and would wrap the stick of luncheon meat in cheesecloth soaked in vinegar for the days in which her family finished it. She and the seven children also gardened fiendishly, and the fruitful garden (my grandmother and her brothers definitely had green thumbs) was a valuable supplement to their diet during those hard years.
My grandmother was often in tears during those lean years, my mother would tell me, because she wanted her daughters to have pretty dresses to wear, but she could not afford the material for dresses that she saw in shop windows. Their nightgowns were recycled flour sacks, made more palatable with bits of lace sewn around the necks and cuffs--lace that my grandmother, her mother, and her mother-in-law had tatted. Lace that was carefully removed from an outmoded or worn-out garment, to be reused on a new one down the road . . . . When the collars and cuffs of her sons' shirts became frayed, my grandmother turned them around and sewed them back onto the shirts, so that they could be reused, other side out.
So nothing about these stories is noble or romantic. These were hard-working, ordinary people doing what they had to do to survive. And doing what they had to do when neighbors were in need. And here's why they had to do what they did for neighbors: this is one of the intriguing aspects of the recent meetings I've had with two sets of cousins on my mother's side of the family. I'm winding around to talking about the role that family stories, handed down generation after generation, can play in inculcating moral values within families.
In my recent meetings with both sets of cousins, one of the long-handed-down stories both sets of cousins repeated to my aunt and me, a story we ourselves heard constantly as we grew up, was this: when our family came to Arkansas from Ireland during the Famine years, the original Patrick (who has created such confusion for our family now that we have Big Pats and Little Pats and Uncle Pat's Pat and Uncle Ed's Pat to sort out), the original Pat, Old Uncle Pat, fed beggars.
He fed beggars because that's what you were supposed to do. He never turned anyone in need from his door, because in Ireland, no one ever turned anyone in need away from his or her door--particularly not in the years of dire hunger during the Famine, when turning away a beggar might mean the difference between life and death. Anyone who came to the door seeking help would get food and also some money from Pat and his wife Delilah, so that when Old Uncle Pat died, my grandmother remembered, people had come from miles around to dig all over his yard, thinking anyone who gave money away so freely had to have buried money around his house.
The original Pat and his wife 'Lilah also took in, according to stories handed down in all of our family lines, several orphans and raised them as their own children. I've managed to confirm the truth of those stories as an adult doing family history, because I have found the adoption papers filed in the county courthouse, with the same names I heard as a child--names of families of neighbors who, for whatever reason, were unable to raise their own children, so that Uncle Pat and Aunt Delilah took them in and raised them as their own children.
And the point of this long ramble down memory lane (and my own family's obsessive memory lane, at that, which may be of little interest to anyone else reading the rambles)? It's to note that, Isn't it remarkable how the same family stories in almost identical words can be handed down in not merely one, but in multiple, branches of the same far-flung family?
And isn't it remarkable how those stories can so shape the character of an entire family that, when you reconnect members of that far-flung family over the years, you not only hear the same stories repeated, but you find that the same traits--for instance, our obligation always to reach out to those in need--can be valued in each branch of the family?
For my part, I do find this remarkable. And it's the loss of these family networks and traditions that I mourn when I mourn--as I did following my trip several weeks ago with Steve to see his cousins in Minnesota--the loss of those family structures that sustain such long memories. And such traditions. And such reminders of our obligations to take care of those around us, to share with others the bread on our table, etc.
We lose much, when we lose all of this. Just as the cousins with whom my aunt and I spent Friday afternoon lost much two years ago when my aunt's first cousin lost her daughter at the age of 59 after that daughter's long battle with lupus--though she spent the last years of her life, knowing that death was approaching, doing everything in her power as a social worker to wheedle, cajole, and bully the state legislature of Oklahoma to take better care of the indigent, physically and mentally challenged, and homeless around the state . . . .
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