Genealogy 1: What's Missing

I've long since concluded that it doesn't matter who you're descended from so much as it does how the stories get told. Sometimes, it's whether they get told.

Various branches of the family have compiled records after doing research, compiled lists, and sometimes passed on stories. I know, for example, one side of the family tree going back to Scotland, fighting alongside William Wallace. Another side goes back as far as my grandmother and can't even pin down her date of birth because she often lied about it. There are many gaps, but they seem to all have one thing in common: it's the women and their stories that are missing. Sometimes we have names and dates for them, but little more. They were apparently nothing more than birthing machines providing more ancestors, as far as the record keepers were concerned.

Even recent women lost their stories. The most startling of those is my own mother. I do know certain facts about her: her birth date, wedding date, date of her death, full name, parent's names, and some of her history once it joined up with my father's. It's all the basic statistics. But unless I heard it from somebody else, I have none of the stories. I never heard them when I was growing up and could have learned from them that this was a human being and not just a PARENT. I could have gotten more of a sense of who I was and my place in this world, just by fitting into a timeline of people connected directly to me. But I had none of that growing up, and didn't learn I missed it until it was too late.

There was a good reason for part of that. My mom had what was referred to as a nervous breakdown. It's one of those things that was never talked about, somehow shameful, a poorly kept family secret. It happened when I was five, and being that young, I was shipped off to live with relatives until she recovered. My older brother stayed home on the resort with my dad, and went to school during the day. They all ceased to exist in my world for most of that school year. I didn't know more than that Mom was sick and I was sent away. I can't remember ever missing them. I led a fuller life than I had ever experienced before, like learning to tie my shoes, write my name, cross the street, finger paint, make my bed. I had a whole new family, an aunt and uncle, two cousins, and later a different aunt and uncle and four cousins and actually got a whole Easter basket, just for me alone! The whole time was filled with more attention than I'd ever gotten, and not the scoldings that I always seemed to earn before. My father had left the child rearing to Mom so there was little interaction there to miss, my brother was a pest (just like I'm sure he thought I was), and Mom was now an absence of scoldings and corrections by being away. For a five-year-old, what's to miss?

Of course, she got better, I went back home, and normal life resumed. I overheard a phone conversation of my mom telling someone how it felt to receive the electric shock treatments she'd gotten, waking up with her mouth stuffed with cotton (real? imaginary?) so had a very dim idea of what happened. At five, I had no idea how damaging they were to her memories or likely her personality. She was who she was now, and that person almost never laughed, never told stories of when she was a little girl with a sister, always was task oriented for herself and for everybody else around her. (I insert here an adult awareness that perhaps after that kind of medical "help", she may have needed to become the paragon of overachievement to help insure it never ever happened to her again.) The lessons I received were how to behave, how to appear to others so they wouldn't think terrible things about you, how to always do your duty. Need I mention that I wasn't very good at those things? When life is work and duty, and whole chunks of your memory have been carved away, there isn't room for stories even if they could have been recovered. I didn't feel the loss. I never knew what I might be missing. I didn't feel a whole lot of things, except plenty of rebellion, and that carried me through well into adulthood.

I was aware of her as a highly critical individual, not only of me, but of others around her, and somehow those comments were always directed at me as well. A woman in church one day had pimples on her face, and Mom commented that by the age of thirty she ought to know better. (What ought she have known? It was never explained, and what came through to my budding adolescence was shame over my own set of pimples.) An aunt had a somewhat budging tummy, and Mom commented about what a disgrace that was, her looking as if she were a whole 6 months pregnant. She conveniently overlooked at the time that both she and I carried our weight in the same exact place, so again all I learned was shame of my own body. Since correction was how she showed her love, I grew up avoiding her when opportunities presented themselves, and that included asking the questions about who she really was and what her life had been like.

As she began to age and become frail, I began to realize what I might be missing. However, any questions I asked were turned away. Certain things never happened - like the nervous breakdown. Where on earth could I have gotten that idea? (My aunt later confirmed my early memories.) There were no stories from childhood because nothing ever happened or if it did it wasn't interesting enough to tell about. Or by now her memory was a sieve and most of her life was confined to here and now, this task, that appointment, this meal, these symptoms and treatments. The skills at maintaining her independence were the vary last things to go, and indeed she kept up such a good front till the end that we were shocked to discover the state of some household things after she'd died.

Perhaps the biggest shock to me was finding out how alike we two were in one way. While growing up, I loved to read, so much that I'd sneak the bedroom lamp under the covers late at night to hide the light, coming up occasionally for fresh air. I was frequently caught at it, and always scolded. I never saw my mom read an actual book. She'd read newspapers, magazines, and other things that didn't take long periods of time, because she could never justify taking that much time away from what needed doing. It wasn't until after she died and I was talking to her sister that I found out she'd been exactly like me when she was a girl, sneaking reading books at every opportunity!

How much else of her life had she lost? And how much of our lives were different because my brother and I never knew who she was?

On my ex's side of the family, one ancestor (important for my kids) is so lost her name is unrecoverable. It never got written in the family Bible, kept meticulously for just that purpose: ____ married ____ on ____ date. Child named _____ born _____. In one case, however, the entry read simply "... took himself a wife." It was so long ago the story persists only in delicious family rumors, passed down for the sake of scandal for family entertainment, poo-poohed in front of strangers if ever anybody should dare bring it up. It seems she was a heathen, or better known these days as a Native American. More likely, considering how the family migrated, she was Native Canadian. Not only do we not have her name, for no heathen's name shall ever be allowed to sully the pages of the Holy Book, but we don't have her tribe.

And at this point, nor does the family have that Bible. A member of a distant branch of the family showed up to visit years ago and asked to see the Bible for the family records. After they left, it was discovered that another old Bible had been substituted on the shelf for the one with the family records in it. We can't go back and get basic beginning information for research.

What we do have, however, is a single picture, two people standing stiffly for the camera. I last saw it on the living room wall after Lylah died and we were going through the book collection to take what we wanted - by invitation, I might add. What is striking about that picture is the woman's face: dark skinned, weatherbeaten, and unmistakeably Indian. On the back of the picture has been written a list of men's names, possibly the list of generations, though there is no explanation, and those who might have been asked were now dead. The name on top is Matthew, so the picture may have been of him and his wife.

When I think of these two women, at least we have some kind of story to explain why their stories are lost. All the others that are listed are simply names and dates without a hint of stories. To me this is heartbreaking. It gives me renewed purpose in setting down what family stories I know as part of the blog, so not everybody will be lost to future generations.