With Your Mother On A Sandy Lawn

With the death of my mother-in-law, Phyllis, in April, has come the not-surprising changes of losing a loved one who has always been there. Even with one in the deep golden years who suffered the maladies of being a smoker for 70 years, death is not a surprise but still brings sadness and loss. Nana’s gained admittance for my husband into the orphan club, where I have been a member since my mom passed in 2004. It also removed the last remaining grandparent from the lives of my girls (and their Washington cousins) and the only one with which they had any kind of relationship, tarnished though it may have been. 

We haven’t yet had the “closure” that will come with burial since, truthfully, we’ve not yet make a decision and so her cremains sit on the entertainment center next the the bowl of chocolate I’m sure she would have enjoyed. The only closure has been the returning of the key to her landlady after we spent a month cleaning out her apartment. She had few belongings and even fewer with sentimental value as she had long since sold off her things when she sold her house then had to replace them with second-hand purchases when she moved into her own apartment. So her passing left us with the usually tawdry duties of paying her final expenses, notifying creditors of her passing and emptying her apartment. Odds and ends were disbursed to the kids. Loads of clothes and tchotchkes were taken to local thrift stores. The rest was carted and piled into our laundry room where we had slowly picked and decided and tossed, whittling the pile down to a few boxes of photos. And in those photos we have found immense value. 

Phyllis had some photos tucked here and there. Mostly from family we know but some, we believe, from people she had met recently. No one we had a connection to. Then...tucked in the back of the closet was a suitcase that belonged to her mother, Helen Weekes Campbell, who passed away in November of 1979 (but returned in the form of Monica, born seven months later).Inside this case were photos..FAMILY photos. Some snapshots.Some professional. Some identified but many...were not. Some we know. Others….Who ARE these people?! Mark didn’t recognize them. Little Nana (Helen) was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. When she married Charles, they moved to California and never really looked back although Helen never lost her New England "accent". She was descended from Stephen Hopkins who signed the Mayflower Compact. She had many “people” but most all were still on the east coast, many on Cape Cod. I started scanning photos into a “mystery family” folder then signed into my Ancestry.com account. 

Mark’s family tree heads off on a few tangents because of the Mayflower history and those records have given me names of “leaves” on unfamiliar branches that I didn’t think I’d ever need but added them to our tree in hopes they might eventually help with confirming other leaves as needed. I found members of those distant families, whose trees correlated with mine and started sending messages via Ancestry, offering up photos in exchange for identifications.First one connection in Nova Scotia - New Scotland, home of the Campbells. Then another. And another. Photos were identified. Others remained in the "folder of mystery". Excited emails were exchanged. The most recent connection started out on Ancestry then, thank Gods for social networking, a friend request on Facebook from Mark’s second cousin, once removed (I’m trusting him on that) who lives in Florida. He proceeded to post on FB some of the photos I had sent, sending out feelers to his cousins. As he said..it started “a firestorm”. Too stinking fun to read the comments and chat back and forth with family, even if it is distant family. Memories of events and of pictures “that grandma had hanging in an oval frame”. The level in my “mystery family” folder is going down as the “old family photos” fills up. 

Of course, these are not MY family. They are names Mark remembers and some I have heard in passing over the past 40 years in conversations with Phyllis. Some, were never mentioned because even she had not met them. In those cases, I suspect the pictures were sent, as some of us do, in Christmas cards to catch up our friends and relations on our lives and those of our children.  The thing is, often we don’t keep those photos and I’m thinking that maybe we should.  We should label them, including the year and squirrel them away in a box for our children to find years from now.  And for THEM to contact distant friends and relations and make connections on whatever comes after Ancestry.com and Facebook. When I’m done with the scanning and identifying, I will bundle up the photos and ship them across the country to the family members who will most enjoy them.  Or maybe….we’ll deliver them ourselves.

We Are Family

The search for family history in Wisconsin continues:

A trip to Milwaukee, when one has never been, can hardly be considered a waste of time but, for the purpose of this trip, it offered no information for me.  Since I had found nothing more on Uncle Charlie in the Milwaukee Public Library, we opted for a trip to Appleton which is where he had lived and worked.  Appleton was much closer to our Green Bay base so the decision was easy.  Charlie was a baker and I found a number of newspaper articles from the mid-twenties describing problems with his neighbors who were none-to-pleased to find out he had been granted permission to expand the bakery he was running from his home.

Monica and Alton wandered the weekly Farmers Market while I hit the adjacent library, combing through Polk's City Directories for bakery addresses as well as more info on Charlie.  No luck beyond 1930.  What the heck?  He wasn't in Appleton and he wasn't in Milwaukee.  Now what?!  I WAS able to find and print the obituary for an aunt whose birthday had evaded me, giving me fodder for Ancestry.com searches so the trip was not a waste.  While we further pondered the expanding (or at least NOT diminishing) mystery of Charlie, we headed to neighboring town, Neenah to make the first of many cemetery visits to my aunts and uncles.  I had already been given the general vicinity of the "drawers" where I would find my Aunt Betty and Uncle Bernie so Monica and I began wandering.  In the process, she spotted the familiar last name of one of my cousins - Charlie's daughter!  The stone had both birth and death dates of her husband but only her name, indicating she was still alive, information I hadn't been able to confirm and was excited to learn.  

After a quick trip south to Oshkosh to take a picture of little Alton in front of the water tower wearing locally named overalls, we sat alongside the Fox River, watching dragonboat races, eating cheese curds and pondering our next move.  Through the miracle of the smart phones, we found a phone number for Alice and, at Monica's urging, I made the call.  How do you announce yourself to a person who doesn't even know you exist?  Happily, Alice recognized my mom's name and invited us to her house but, truthfully, I was a little concerned that she did so since we may NOT have been who we said we were.  I'll allow her own children to do THAT scolding.

When Alice answered the door, it was clear we were related and she said the same...we laughed at our similarities and, when I took my mom's photo albums out, she marveled at how much my mom and her older sister looked alike.  Since my mom was the youngest and Charlie was the oldest, his daughter and his youngest sister were just three weeks apart.  It turned out that Alice had only minimal contact with her father from the time she was born as her birth coincided with their divorce proceedings.  She had little information and we were careful to not bring up dirt I had unearthed but, when Monica asked just the right question, she casually mentioned that Charlie had changed his name.  He what?!  "Alice, this is HUGE!". That tiny piece of information made a world of difference to this trip and the research I was doing.

It turned out he had returned to Appleton for the last few years of his life, information known only by one of my aunts.  Alice was only told at the time of his death.  Charlie had chosen a new name from one he saw on a sign, presumably to keep himself off the radar of creditors. His new wife and son had taken the new name and Alice, when asked where he was buried, suggested we try the tiny community of Medina (Ma-DY-nuh), where his wife's family had lived. 

That night, I checked the Find-A-Grave website and confirmed there were relatives of the second Mrs. Charlie buried in Medina.  The next day, we decided we would start at the cemetery in Medina, then to neighboring Hortonville cemetery should we not find Charlie at the first.  Medina was a leisurely twenty mile drive on a beautiful little two-lane highway 96 and we had no problem finding the town's cemetery.  We wandered the rows and easily found the missus, with her new name, but were still trying to find Charlie when a car pulled in and parked near us.  A nicely dressed lady, fresh from church, walked over to us and asked if we were looking for anyone in particular.  It turns out she was the secretary of the cemetery and knew everyone in town.  When I told her, she knew exactly who I was talking about.  She knew Charlie.  She knew his son, Jack.  She knew Jack's son "who lives in the white house over there around the corner...".  "Wait, I have Jack's phone number at my house; I'll be right back".  With that, she drove off, leaving Monica and I standing there, stunned.

As we waited, surrounded by the grave stones of the residents of this town, it occurred to us that some were OUR family members.  That name change started a new line of a new family, forever breaking their link to the family name but their blood was our blood.  As we pondered this, the lady we now knew as Evelyn returned.  She popped out of her car along with a young women.  "I got Jack's number but I did one better...I brought his granddaughter."  Seriously?  This beautiful young lady, about Monica's age, was really Jack's granddaughter.....my uncle's great-granddaughter? We hugged.  We laughed.  We agreed to meet at the town's tavern, once run by her mother's family, for lunch.  

When Nicole arrived, she was soon followed by her mother and the four of us spend several hours filling each other in on family history, previously undiscovered by either side.  She had no idea that her great-grandfather was born with a different last name or that he was one of nine children.  We had no idea that Charlie's son had also grown up to be a baker and he had worked at that very tavern when he was married to Nicole's grandmother.  And Nicole knew where Charlie was buried.  I got names and dates to add to my family tree and, after lunch, we headed to the Hortonville cemetery to finally visit with my uncle.  

The visit ended up being somewhat anti-climatic because there was no stone to mark Charlie's final resting place.  There had been a temporary marker but, since he had passed in 1969, the marker had become brittle and was nowhere to be found.  Nicole had been there before and knew where he was so I spent a little time wandering the bare lawn, finally at the end of this search.  I had figured out where my Uncle Charlie ended his days and our journeys both ended in Hortonville, Wisconsin.  

The next morning, found us on the road east, heading to Eau Claire, the city where my mom was born and raised.  Mark and I have seen much of the country's perimeter but the midwest had never been on the radar except for the fact that it was my mom's home.  The four-hour journey across a state was beautiful.  Flat.  Farms.  A bald eagle.  The changing colors of the trees that warmed my soul almost as much as the ocean.  In Eau Claire, we tracked down the rest of my family's graves, including my grandparents whom I never met.  In the process, we drove around the same town my mom had driven around with her friends.  We couldn't find the family house but found out since that the house was renumbered so that will be a visit for another day.

On the return trip from Eau Claire, Monica again urged me to make a phone call, this time to Jack.  He at least at been warned about us by his granddaughter who had called while we had lunch.  He gave me directions to the house and, in their home on a very dark Wisconsin highway, I made the acquaintance of another cousin, one whose name had been changed when he was six years old and who had no real information of his father's family.  Again, I shared my mom's photo album and plan to make some copies to send him.  

When I started making plans for this trip, it was pipe dreams.  I had originally planned to stay in Eau Claire but changed to Green Bay when it because obvious that finding my Uncle would require research in that eastern part of the state.  I came for family.  I found family.  I had planned to go alone to eliminate the need to drag others along which I attended to the drudgery of library research.  I invited Monica and Alton to ensure I ventured out to see some sites outside of the library and maybe try a midwestern microbrew.  It proved to be a good decision since Monica encouraged me to take chances with making those phone calls and Alton, like all babies, was a great ice-breaker.  Although he won't remember the trip, the photos we took were memorable and he'll know he was a part of it. 

Monica decided that the word for this trip was "serendipity".  The serendipity of her spotting the grave marker with Alice's name.  The serendipitous visit from an angel named Evelyn who stopped by the cemetery to see what the work party of the day before had wrought and, instead, facilitated a family reunion.  There was also a black swallowtail butterfly that fluttered by us at the cemetery that Monica plans to add to the ink butterflies she collects.  Serendipity indeed.

Find Your Own Way Home

Should a person really be this excited about a trip to a place that is neither exciting nor exotic?  Well, to be honest, maybe Wisconsin is both; I’ve never been there. I just know my mom USED to live there. Until her father passed away in 1941, she lived in Eau Claire. She worked at a candy plant and the pressure cooker plant. I know this because there are old black and white photos of her with the “pressure cooker gang” or the "Webster's Crew 1939" from the candy factory. There are countless pictures of her with her friends and old beau in their brand new winter coats hanging out in a park along a river. Well, next month I plan to see that river and, hopefully, that little park. 

While she is on maternity leave, Monica (along with little Alton) will accompany me on this adventure to Wisconsin to visit the graves of my grandparents and many of my aunts and uncles. We’ll visit the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay where there is a research library of Wisconsin history in hopes of tracking down my elusive uncle Charlie. I hope to meet family but, to be honest, I’m not sure they feel the same. I have searched with Ancestry.com and the world-wide interwebs, the names of my cousins and their children then have tried to make connections through Facebook but they don’t respond.  My paranoid self wonders, could it mean they have looked at my profile and don’t see anything they like. Perhaps they don’t often go on Facebook so just haven’t seen my messages. Perhaps they will eventually respond and we will knock back shots of Patron and have a high ol’ time. I hope so.

Aloisia and Karl Goettlicher

My German (actually Austrian) side seems to be a mite....standoffish which was the impression I got from my mom and, in later years, my aunt who I contacted for info.  Seems no one ever talked about the past.  They didn’t discuss the journey they made from the old country when my grandfather and his oldest son, Charlie, boarded the SS Cassell in Bremen on August 4 of 1910 and barely two weeks later, made their American landfall in Baltimore.  My grandmother didn't talk about the subsequent trip she made in October, with six children, including a 9-month-old Raley sailing on the Freidrich der Gross (Fredrick the Great), coming through Ellis Island.  Such an amazing journey but they didn’t talk about it.  They apparently didn’t share the stories of their portage that would make them come alive in my mind.

So I have the headstones of Karl and Aloisia; just their names carved in granite.  Aloisia, the inspiration for my middle name - Louise.  I wrinkled my nose at the name as a child but have grown to love my connection with a grandmother I never met, who died when my mother was only nine.  It was also passed on to her second daughter, Louise.  When in Eau Claire, we will visit my Uncle Joseph who is buried with his wife near Grandma and Grandpa as well as my Aunt Raley, Aurelia, and her husband.  I have tracked the locations of my aunts Louise and Augusta (Gusty) and Anna but am still searching for Mary.  And Charlie.  But if they are all I have, I want to visit.  I want to walk among those fields of granite and stroll past the river where my mom hung with her besties.  

Mark and I have traveled the southern part of the country on our honeymoon drive to South Carolina.  We've visited the east coast and the north as far as Montana.  Until now, the midwest has escaped my company.  We will actually stay in Green Bay...two people people who care less about baseball, you’ll never find...*kidding*.  We’ll probably spend a bit of time tracking down a lighthouse or two along Lake Michigan. But mostly this trip will be about family and about following the trail of crumbs that lead us to our ancesters.  The connections that make me laugh when I see my mom and her sisters when I look in the mirror.  It's nice to know I have that connection.  If my relatives are concerned about this stranger from California, I suspect they will see the family resemblance.

If I Leave Here Tomorrow, Will You Still Remember Me?

My fingers are tender from carving back the sod threatening to envelope the lonely headstones. I have recently begun a real search for family history, spurred on by the deaths of the last remaining aunts and uncles. I started asking questions in the past but, when faced with ambiguity, gave up the push. Now loss of information looms and the lack, if left to it's own devises, may be the victor.

In my quest, I was led to Find-A-Grave, a website where cemeteries are surveyed and headstones photographed. As I began to search for the headstones of my relatives, I found an opportunity to post photos I had taken, and to volunteer to take photos of headstones of people in our local graveyards for family members living too far away to do it themselves. There are a few of us around here and everyone seems to have cemeteries with which they have become familiar so I held back from "claiming" requests for awhile, deferring to the experts, but when I saw no one taking up the challenge of Myrtle Grove, I made it mine.

Now, me and Myrtle have become friends and I have found it to be my favorite City park. Most weekends, I spend a few hours meandering the rows. Generally I'm looking for a specific grave as per a relative's request but often I wander aimlessly, taking note of the names. There are so many Stewarts and Fosters, McCanns and Hills. And because this was one of the original burial grounds for the area, there are Vances and Carsons and, of course, Buhne. Herrick. Glatt. Cousins. Everding. Albee.

Myrtle Grove was created in 1860 by a group of citizens. In 1958, the stones were surveyed and collected, the family plots cleared and previously upright monuments laid down for ease of mowing. That sounds so wrong, doesn't it? Rearranging the final resting places and beautiful monuments for "ease of mowing"? It even appears as if some stones, with engraving on both sides, were laid horizontal...putting the birth and death dates of one person face DOWN. Shortly afterward, the land was taken over by the City of Eureka which has cared for her ever since. The lack of a groundskeeping budget leaves Myrtle the beneficiary of only occasional passes with the mower and her residents' gravemarkers sinking away in the abyss of neglect. Slowly, many of the flat stones are being enveloped by soil and sod, obscuring the intricate dates and decorations. Alice's (below) seems to be encircled with roses... As I make my way around, I have found some contentment in carving away the creeping weeds and freeing the words to identify those that lay below. My fingers are sore but it seems a small price to pay for those who lived in this area so long ago. I can't help but wonder about their families. The sons of their son's sons. Their great great great great granddaughters. Do they ever visit?

As my knife carves around the stone, attempting to identify the perimeter, the shape of each particular memorial different from the last, I sometimes scratch the surface. The blade etches clean scratches through the accumulation of decades-old grime. My initial panic at the damage done was soon overcome by the decision that these people, these pioneers and elders of the community wouldn't mind someone tidying up a bit, allowing the sun and rain to touch a little more of their headstones.