Do I Remember?

I believe my dad carried this photo of his parents and sister, along with dog, Trixie, to war with him. I love it for the memory of the pipe.

Usually I meander along a rolling stream of consciousness process before I connect a family history/herstory discovery with a Sepia Saturday prompt. But this week no such journey was needed. The connection with smoking was direct and immediate. I remember fights with my maternal grandfather over my dislike of his cigarette smoking. Even today I can’t stand the slightest whiff of lingering smoke in a hotel room or on the clothing of a hairdresser. 

But pipe smoke. That is different. And likely for the powerful sensory memories that bring me back to a place and time for which I have only a dreamlike memory. Thankfully, it answers a self-doubt.

Do I remember him or just know the photo?

In the furthest reaches of recollection, I am not sure if I really possess any visual memories of my paternal grandfather. I have mind pictures of him sitting in a chair, holding a dog I believe to be named Pooh-Pooh. But is that visual memory real or has it taken shape thanks to the few photos I possess? I can’t be sure.

I never hear his voice in my mind’s ear. Was he a storyteller like my father and his brother who could recount a situation, replete with details of the subject’s family tree and the mishaps of their youth, as the tale took its winding course, punctuated with the teller’s index finger shaking the details at his listener? Had this trait been passed from father to sons? I have no idea.

But that pipe aroma. Any hint of pipe tobacco jars my sense of place along the time continuum and wafts me back to where the memory of Louis Hart, Jr. resides. His pipe comes alive, its smoke encircling my soul. In the mysterious workings of the brain, it is odor that invokes the most powerful and vivid memories in all of us.  For me, that scent is the reassuring substantiation that I did know my paternal grandfather and he knew me. That is comforting.

Dog Genes

This Sepia Saturday post should have been easier for someone trained as a Reading Specialist, but alas, all the pictures I wanted to use are still in a photo album in my mother's house. So, I began flipping through my photos and found this perfectly staged picture for a 1960s Christmas card showing the week's theme, reading. And what better subject for the Hart family then to have a dog reading, for this sums up so much of our family history!

I read while Candy looks on. Oh, the other girl in the picture is my sister, Claudia. An apt afterthought given the story that follows!

We have long joked about the "dog gene" in our family. We all have had many dogs and know that we come by this adoration honestly. This was quite apparent to me during my last trip to my mother's house. I love to page through her old albums, take selected photos to her, and hope for a story to unfold.  Like all our photos, they capture a tale, even when clearly posed. Sadly, some pictures show faces that will never be known to me. I mourn the loss of names that have been forgotten over the years so try to remedy past oversights by captioning what photos I can. This quest gave my mom and me quite a laugh as we looked at pictures like these from the 1930s and 1940s:

This small sampling shows our well-known family love for dogs. But while other family photos are missing the names of relatives and friends, the dogs in the photos are always clearly labeled.

My great grandchildren may not know the male in the photo is their 4x great grandfather, Thomas Richards or their 2x great grandmother, Barbara Sundberg is the dog-loving child, but they will know the hounds who lived on Superior Street in the 1930s are Boots, Bugle, Young Prince, Old Prince, etc. I wasted no time laughingly chastising my mom for this lapse. Yet somehow, the omission reveals an overarching family trait: the deep love we have for the dogs, who are not just our pets and companions, but our family.


This was never clearer to me then when I returned home to look at photos of my own children.

Turning over the photo of Andrew revealed that some things never change. I had labeled the picture ONLY with the dog’s name. Yep, it does run in the family!

The Tale

 

Boxes? Boxes? I had nothing for the Sepia Saturday prompt about boxes. But then I began listing boxes in my head and ended up at boxcars…boxcars, ah, trains! There it was – the tale of the Paulding Lights as shared by my dad, William Hart.

Here, my dad (kneeling) holds his dog, Trixie, while his parents stand near-by. 

Who told the tale? 

   

            “There it is, down through those trees,” my dad’s outstretched pointer finger poked at the car window to indicate what appeared to be a desolate spot in a forgotten part of the world.  It was the place of the famed Paulding Lights, mysterious glowing orbs that confound locals and adventurers. But true to form, my dad knew their history and told it that day in the car.

His tale is one fraught with fragments, now stitched together by his listeners for he is no longer here to retell his version.  The yarn that lives on is one I have struggled to authenticate.  I interviewed those in the car, talked with cousins, and researched the factual parts of the story. But memories are different or nonexistent. The incidents relayed in the anecdote don’t match with documented facts. As a researcher, this created an ethical dilemma for me: Do I share the story as I’ve pieced it together? It may not be true.

But in the quiet of my night, the answer was clear. This was not meant to be objective history; it was family (his)story. It didn’t matter if the facts were accurate. Its value was in the sharing. Even in the telling of it, my dad was communicating a slice of life, of his beliefs, and of his days growing up on Bluff Street. I can imagine his mother, standing at her gate or pinning her wet laundry to the clothesline, spinning the yarn, and fascinating her son with the mystery of it all. Yes, true or not, this fable is a part of my family lore.  

The bare bones of the tale are shared below. Believe it or not!

            It was a Saturday. Louis Hart, Jr. was preparing to leave his home on Bluff Street to work his shift as a fireman on the steam locomotive that ran out of Marquette. Thankfully, for the generations that followed, he never made it to his post that night. That fateful failure led to his survival and another’s demise, for the train crashed, just outside of Paulding, MI.  Legend claims the souls that perished never rest. They walk the tracks, swinging their ghostly lanterns, in a never-ending quest to stop the inevitable. Years later Louis was one of those startled by these spectral lights, reminding him of the fragility of choices.

            Today the Paulding Lights are a mecca of sorts for ghost hunters, thrill seekers, and those with a fascination for disproving the paranormal. The spot is marked with a U.S. Forest Service plaque, has been featured on the Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files television show, and was the subject of a Michigan Tech University study. Questions about this place remain. But to me, it will always be the subject of Essie and Louis Hart’s tale as told by my dad and now shared by family members who have memories of differing details.  Ah, families!

My grandfather, Louis Hart, Jr., in train garb.  He clearly notes on the 1920, 1930, and 1940 Census Reports that he is a locomotive fireman, squeezing in the word, fireman, on both the 1930 and 1940 forms.

My dad always scoffed at family history, yet in his aged handwriting, he captioned this photo for eternity: Dad Louis, and Jody Kaufman.

Unexpected Destinations

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Delighted to back with Sepia Saturday after a long personal drought.

The name of the town is familiar, Champion, Michigan. It is one of those towns of my childhood where what seemed like endless, long dusty car trips would result in the family pouring out of the back of a station wagon to set up a picnic. But if the town scrapes the cobwebs of my mind, the stern family etched in time, has no meaning for me.  The photograph is one of several that were once mounted in a maroon velvet album, kept in my grandmother’s basement. As a child, I loved the smell of that musty thing, and even more, adored paging through the photos, imagining those people of old. It was silly of me to never have asked my grandmother for the names of these unknown family and friends.  Now I struggle to put together the pieces. I show them to the 80 year-olds who squint and say, “Well, it could be a Millman or Richards,” and I wait for the soliloquy regarding facial features. But as I’ve continued my ancestor hunt, I find many of those supposed matches just do not fit. The child is too old for the time they spent in Vermont or the identified person did not live in the town during the year noted on the back of the photo. I sigh. And the only way to make up for my abject failure to quiz my grandmother is to write voraciously on the back of my own photos or to post them, heavily captioned, on a family website. 

The cabinet photo in question seemed to hold many clues. Champion is and was always a small town. The name of the studio, scrolled at the bottom, should have been an easy find I reasoned. But a search of the city directories, on Ancestry.com revealed no L. Winsor Studio for the available years, 1894-1917, a reasonable time frame based on the clothing worn by the females.  An Internet search indicates this photographer may have had a studio in Champion in the early 1890s but then moved westward. At least I had a date, but one that once more led me to curse the loss of those precious 1890 census records. I scoured my family tree for cousins with the requisite number of family members living in the area at the time. Coming up short, I got out my magnifying glass and studied facial features, hoping to identify family traits. Nothing worked. I returned to my tree and picked at families of families.

And then, an answer. It was that rush of joy that I had been missing since I last engaged in this exploration, so many months ago. But, as has been true with most of my genealogical investigations, the solution was not the one I had been seeking. No, I still do not know the identity of this family, lovingly saved in my grandmother’s basement. But the search of the siblings clarified a nagging question: the mystery of why my family had chosen Ishpeming, Michigan as their destination when the Ely/Vershire mining operation was beginning to fail. The Richards and Simons branches, united by the marriage of my great great grandparents in Ely, had pulled up their fragile roots in that waning mining town to journey for frigid northern Michigan. I had often wondered why the growing clan chose this spot to begin life anew. The photo search unintentionally revealed a Richards brother, long ignored by me, who had traveled directly from Gwinear, Cornwall with his wife and young son to the mines of Upper Michigan. I now had the name of that ancestor who was the impetus for the family move to “the Yoop,” the place where our roots would run strong and deep throughout the 20^th century.

That brother? Matthew Richards - a coincidence my family will find amusing.

The journey we begin does not always bring us to the destination we intend.

An Amazing Journey: Sepia Saturday 6 October 2012

 

As I write this week’s Sepia Saturday post focusing on ships, I think of the various vessels that brought my ancestors to the shores of the United States. I ponder these journeys while eating a saffron bun, a treasured treat of my Cornish heritage. As a child I grew with these dishes that were remnants and reminders of the long ship journey from the homeland: pasties, saffron buns, Cousin Jack cookies, Sunday roasts, goodies that remind me of how thankful I am that despite my ancestors’ long ocean voyage from the rolling hills of Cornwall to the frigid shores of Lake Superior, those recipes were treasured as mementos of the home they left and were passed to us today. 

I have been on a journey of a different sort.  And while not a journey on a ship, my journey has spanned time and place as I unearth the lives of the families, mostly miners, of my past. I began with my mother’s side of the family tree for she is alive and valuable memories can be coaxed from her. The tales of my journey into her family tree are told elsewhere on this blog. It is a journey full of mouse clicks, Internet discoveries, travels to my home in Marquette, Michigan, to Ely, Vermont, and the best journey, a trip across the ocean to stand in the little villages my great grandparents and beyond called home.

The St. Ive Parish Church. The village of St. Ive, not to be confused with the seaside town of St. Ives, had a population of 468 people in 1801. In 2001, 2121called St. Ive home. 

The photo above is of the parish church in a small Cornish village, St. Ive, where one branch of my mother’s family lived. The opportunity to visit this roadside village and walk among the markers took me back to the time when Jane Ruse Hill and daughters must have journeyed from their home to Sunday service. I felt their presence among the grave markers and in the rustle of the bushes.

Lately, I have let my mother’s genealogy rest a bit while I travel back through the generations of my dad’s side of the family. Imagine my surprise when this same small village cropped up in the census, baptismal, marriage, and death records of the Doneys and Slades, names from his branch of our one family tree. 

What karmic destiny that centuries later and an ocean away, the descendants of two families who inhabited this same tiny Cornish village would meet and marry!

Now I plan to journey across that ocean again, to once more walk the churchyard of St. Ive, this time to think about those ancestors on both sides of my family tree who packed up their lives and memories, stepped onto a ship, crossed the vast ocean so that their descendants could once again join together in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  It is a strange and wonderful journey we share.

A Ringing Force in Societal Evolution

Sepia Saturday - This week's theme inspired me to complete my telephone story. For ease, I have included the first part, again, here with its conclusion. As for the theme – how much have TIMES changed, do we NEED clocks anymore… all those thought-provoking ideas (I may be watching too much Mad Men!) If you read to the end, I promise this will make sense!

It seemed to be a rite of passage, a way to assert independence and communicate with the outside world. The telephone. Its evolution seems to be a symbol for the generations of family who walked this Earth during my lifetime.  An impetus for social change, it symbolizes the mindset and cultural transformation of each generation. Purposively, I use the present tense, as it seems that each day brings a step in another direction as we communicate with others. 

The siblings with a later version of the phone I remember.

One of my earliest memories is fear of the curious apparatus in my grandmother’s living room.  I can’t place my age when I first noticed that black handset sitting on the wiry stand, but even today I shudder, just a bit, with the memory of my grandmother’s rare scolding. Drawn to the mysterious object, I picked it up, only to hear the words, “Central, number please.” Grandma was right there admonishing me to “put that thing down” and extolling me to never touch it again.  The strange voice I had awakened from the peculiar contraption frightened me. It was something beyond my understanding, as were my grandma’s unusual harsh words.                        

As I reflect on those first phones, I am sure to my grandmother and many others like her, they inaugurated a welcome sense of freedom. So many women of her generation never drove; rather they relied on their husbands to transport them from place to place. Through those telephone lines, recipes could be exchanged, gossip could be shared, and feelings and worries had a receptive ear at any time during the long days at home. Female bonding took on an enhanced role, thanks to the phone.                     

Time marched on and that sole telephone in both my grandmother’s home and our home now sported a dial. The boxy phone mounted on the kitchen wall would ring and was answered by the mindlessly polite requirement, “Hart residence, Kathy speaking.”  Those were the days when you could pick up that beige receiver to call for the time and the female voice would nasally recite the hour and minute. You relied on the phone book and few ever used an area code. In fact, the first two numbers were often a word. In our town, we said Canal for the initial numerals 22. My grandmother’s number began with Hudson.  While today we struggle with remembering our own cell number, I can still effortlessly rattle off my best friend’s number and my grandmother’s number. They are deeply ingrained.    

Sometime in my high school years, the Mad Men of advertising lured me with the image that I could be a princess.  Along with most girls, I longed for the sleek dial phone with the coiled cord, so captivatingly crowned, the Princess Phone. It was a status symbol and sitting next to a bed, provided independence from parental ears.

That sleek blue Princess Phone. I remember well the day it was installed in my bedroom. I was royalty. No longer a prisoner to the wall-mounted beige box in the kitchen, I could now close my door and dial Katie, Rita, or Pam.  Of course, my ears were always on alert for the telltale click signaling someone, usually my sister, had picked up the other phone. This became a skill, perfected like an artist’s craft.  An accomplished stealth could slowly and almost silently release those knobs to discover the innermost secrets of the speakers. Oh, the sibling fights and parental questions! These continued with our race to answer the ring with the shout, “I’ll get it,” a phrase that was destined to disappear in my lifetime.

            This was an era when the phone book was kept next to the phone, the busy signal an annoyance, especially to parents, and the ring was universal. This slowly transformed as my daughter grew. No longer were we chained and stationary. We could walk and talk. The dial with the phone number displayed in the center, disappeared. We punched buttons and raised the antenna. For my daughter the dial became a perplexing contrivance.  At a church dinner, Jenn asked to use a phone that was tucked away in a corner of the musty social hall. Returning to the table with a puzzled look, she announced, “It doesn’t work.” Never having seen this “old fashioned” instrument, she had been punching the dial rather than rotating it, a story that is told as often as possible in our house.

During my daughter’s growing years, answering machines began the destruction of the busy signal, making one to free to leave the house, even if an important call was expected.  Call waiting birthed the phrase, “the other line,” as we ignored one conversation for another, possibly making a listener feel abandoned and signaling a sense that someone or something else was more important. This only increased with the next rendition of the phone.

Our son was born in the 1990s, the same decade the cell phone began to emerge in American pockets.  It felt like a splurge when my husband rented such a device for me to carry in the car as I traveled across country. But that spurge evolved into a necessity. At first it was merely a family cell phone that we each reveled in carrying, just in case of emergency. But, at home, the landline still reigned as necessary, especially when the family computer circulated its connection tone. There were times when we would be “kicked offline” by a call, sometimes leading to an unfair annoyance with the unsuspecting caller.

By September 11, 2001, the family cell phone had given way to personal devices. My daughter communicated the horror of that fateful day via her flip phone from her dorm at Virginia Tech as I sat helpless in my first grade classroom. Because carrying such a phone was relatively new, policies regarding the use of them at work were almost nonexistent. My daughter continued to relay the mounting terror from her vantage point in front of the television. My mother returned from shopping to hear a message on her home answering machine from my husband who called from his cell phone, a generational image that telegraphed the differences in the way we used communication.

More importantly and sadly, victims made final calls. And then as the hours seared the enormity of the tragedy into our souls, our D.C. suburb was shrouded in silence as overloaded phone networks became still, giving us a needed chance to reflect and mourn. It was almost as if the network had to pause and consider, too.

As the decade wore on, families joined the fast track of communication. Landlines began to disappear.  Computers didn’t need those home phone lines anymore so why should we have them? Our cell phones could place a call to anyone, anywhere. Networks touted their reliability over others. The infamous query, “Can you hear me now?” was a favored shout into the phone and laughed about in our family, especially after our trek through Tibet where we witnessed our guide, cell phone in hand, speak softly to a guide on another mountain. Their reliable network didn’t need the catch phrase that had become a hallmark of our dropped calls and fickle connections.  

A new era was calling. Phones had morphed into one-stop shops with cameras, videos, and texting capability to the point where many actually let their fingers do the talking. We revel in our ability to match ringtones to the personalities calling us. Our phones are the answering machines, phone books, call screeners, and alert systems for news, weather, and our friend’s most intimate thoughts.  

I wonder what the future of the phone holds. Back in the sixties my mother read that one day we would use videophones. Today, my 20 month-old grandson connects my voice and face, thanks to those video calls that are now the norm. (Face)Times, indeed, have changed.

If you’re like me, your smart phone is a necessity, one that can even whistle “Dixie” as the old saying goes. I need not list all the capabilities here, but this week’s theme? Clocks and watches? Sadly, not needed anymore, a young relative informed me. For all the planet’s news, weather, and time, simply tap the app!

So, this brings me full circle back to my grandmother’s admonishment, “Put that thing down.” Perhaps I need to live those words today. My iPhone is always in my pocket, purse, or within easy reach. I feel empty and positively naked when I accidentally leave the house without it. Do I ignore others with my constant checking of that little screen? Most likely and embarrassingly, the answer is yes. There are many times I really should “put that thing down.” My grandmother was smarter than I gave her credit for! 

Sepia Saturday - Weddings Wed Families!

Family and friends gather to celebrate the wedding of my grandparents.

After a family member requested I not post my original Sepia Saturday Wedding Story, I frantically pored through stacks of old photos to see if I had anything else to offer. I came across the above photo that seemed to be indicative of my confusion regarding my mother’s side of the family. The bride and groom, Harold (for some reason everyone called him Brix) Sundberg and Myrtle Richards, my grandparents, were married on 12 August 1925 and thus began the tangled web of family tree branches, entwined in such a jumble that even today, my mother, who grew up within earshot of these relatives, still does not know how her contemporaries, much less the offspring, are related.  It seemed appropriate I write one of my famously silly rhymes to illustrate the confusion of it all.

Just HOW Are We Related?

A Superior Street family was busy in their house,

Their only daughter, preparing to marry her spouse.

Her parents from England were a likely pair,

Stories, recipes, and culture, they would share.

These families from Cornwall boasted many surnames,

Millman, Richards, and Simons were some of their claims.

Ignoring tradition, Myrtle married a Swede,

A handsome guy, Brix, all the Cornish agreed.

The bride’s cousin, once removed, of the Simons clan,

Stood at the wedding as the couple’s best man.

The groom’s Swedish first cousin stood for the bride,

But there’s more to this story – you will need a guide!

The bride and groom’s cousins were husband and wife,

Making for a confusing and intertwined life!

At parties and family gatherings by the Christmas tree,

I only knew these people were, somehow, “related” to me.

Am I a great aunt or cousin twice removed?

What term is correct and genealogy approved?

But, in the end does it matter if the relationships are clear?

It’s the love and lasting memories that we hold so dear.

A memento of the wedding day. Note the signatures of my grandfather's first cousin, Inez, and grandmother's cousin, once removed, Clayton.