I'm BAAAAAAACK.....

It's been a long time.  As in LOOOOOOOONG time.

And I can't say exactly *why* I'm back, other than the fact that I've felt impressed recently to begin again documenting the discoveries I come across while researching my lovely ancestors.  For a family historian with a fictitious maiden name and a father who just wouldn't talk about his ancestors, I'm constantly amazed at the information, connections, and experiences that have fallen in my lap over the years--particularly in the last 7 or 8 years.  I don't believe in coincidences--I know they are gifts from a loving Heavenly Father for which I am beyond grateful.

So this is a new beginning of sorts.  Especially since these newest discoveries pertain to Mother's family and not Daddy's.  I've been obsessed with my Dad's Hardy/Bower/Bridgarts for so long now and have shamefully neglected Mother's Shutt and Robbins folk.  I've just been assuming that those two lines are fairly well documented and that they wouldn't require a whole lot of work.

Yeah, some of them are well documented, all right, but geez-o-pete there are some doozies out there that I either forgot about or never knew about in the first place.

This week is a classic example.  First, it was finding Abraham Lincoln on the same burial register as some of my Shutts in Springfield, Illinois.  Tonight it's a little obituary I just randomly picked out of Colonel's papers about his mother.  It seems that Mary Duffield Moore Shutt was the grand-daughter of Thomas Rutherford, foreman of the grand jury that indicted abolitionist John Brown after his ill-fated raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859, one of the most important events that set the stage for the Civil War.  

Holy Cow......

Here is Mary Duffield Moore Shutt in an undated photograph.  

I cannot WAIT for the next "Holy Cow" moment.....

Beginning with the end in mind...

“Did you always know,” I asked, “that you were a descendant of the slaves at the Smith farm?”  “No,” he replied, leaning back in his chair.  “It wasn’t discussed.  You didn’t discuss those things.”  It took a moment for him to frame the sentence.  “We know where we end,” he said.  “We don’t know where we begin.”

I was sitting at a table in the library with my colleague, Kelly, and an elderly black gentleman whom we had recently discovered was the great-grandnephew of “Uncle Wilke,” one of the approximately two dozen enslaved men, women, and children owned through the years by the Smith family—original owners of the History Center’s Smith Family Farm.  He had walked into the library almost two years ago while I was working the reference desk and asked if the History Center would be interested in the information he was gathering about his ancestors.  I jumped at the chance to get his contact information, passed it on to one of the historic house managers, and promptly got overtaken by other events.  I only remembered that encounter when it was announced that the History Center was going to host an exhibit next month based on the enslaved families at Jefferson’s Monticello.  The exhibit included a massive genealogical project that traced the descendants of those slave families and conducted oral history interviews with them.  The project documented the lives of those descendants, providing the “rest of the story” about them.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could contact this man?  Kelly found him and arranged for the meeting.  His last name is Smith, too.

“So how did you find out?” I asked him.  He explained that his Aunt Grace knew a lot about the family history.  When he began to do his own research, he asked her for information and she told him.  He realized then that his father knew.  His aunts and uncles knew.  They all knew.  But they didn’t talk about it.  “Do you remember that conversation?” I asked.  With a faint smile he replied, “Oh, I remember some of it.”

WOW, I thought, I can’t ask him for more before I ask him if we might record it.  This is going to be too intense for note-taking.  That conversation had to have been life changing.  The archivist/genealogist in me began to mentally rub my hands together in anticipation of such a coup.  THIS is gonna be incredible!  “Mr. Smith,” I began, “please say no if this makes you uncomfortable…don’t hesitate to tell us no, but we have a camera here.  Would you be willing to let us let the camera run while you remember that conversation?” 

There was a long pause.  With a half smile he finally replied softly, “Maybe next time.”  There was a moment of hesitation, and then his face crumbled, his eyes welled up with tears, and he brought a weathered hand to his face and began to weep.  Stunned, all I could think to do was dash to the desk for the box of Kleenex we keep there, fervently praying along the way that I could find a way to repair the breach; to stop the flow of pain.

When I returned, he had managed to come to grips with his emotion, but it was a tenuous grip.  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Smith, I didn’t mean to upset you,” I heard myself stumble.  He  shook his head apologetically and I grabbed the moment to launch into a story of my own.  “Memories can be tough…” I offered, hoping to turn the tide of memory to happier shores—away from the rocks.  It worked.  He laughed as I described my experience all those years ago, frantically scribbling Daddy’s memories onto the backs of my checking account deposit slips after he’d had a few too many Budweisers.  “Yes,” Mr. Smith laughed, “sometimes that’s the best way to get at these memories!”

We continued our visit, bringing books and papers to the table that might shed more light on the Smith slaves.  We walked over to the 1893 Fulton County map and he and Kelly located the area where the farm stood.  I asked if he had ever seen the photograph we have of the family at the farm in the late 1800s.  He said he hadn’t.  I quickly brought it up from the stacks and laid it on the table before him.  “Oh my,” he said.  We explained that the photograph was taken in 1884.  We watched as he took it all in.  The white family standing at the front of the house.  The black man standing near the horses.  The black women off to the side.  The little girls standing next to them.  The children sprawled on the ground in the foreground, staring straight at the camera.  “Oh my.”  We came to the conclusion that based on the date of the photograph and the birthdates of his great-grandfather and siblings, there was every possibility that those children in the photograph were, indeed, his ancestors.

By the time he left us, he seemed to indicate that perhaps one day he could share that story with us—the start of his journey to find where he began.  He said we might be able to interview another of his aunts—Ethel—perhaps by phone.  “We can come to her,” I suggested quickly.  He shook his head and smiled, “Oh, she may not let you in!” “Well, maybe you can talk her into it,” we teased. 

He was smiling when he left. 

I am hopeful.

And I am changed.  In that split second before his face dissolved into tears, I glimpsed the pain in his eyes and I suddenly realized that everything I thought I knew about slavery was unimportant.  Dred Scott v. Sandford.  Anthony Burns.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Harper’s Ferry.  I knew all those facts.  I’ve read the stories—even the first-hand accounts—and have been moved by them.

But nothing like this.

I know where I began, so I can never really know what it feels like to not know.  My great-grandfather appears in the census records by name.  I know exactly when and where he was born.  I know what he did for a living, who his parents were, from where they immigrated.  When I see “9” in the column labeled “mother of how many children” next to his wife’s name and “7” in the column marked “how many children living,” my heart aches for him and my great-grandmother and those babies they lost.  When I see his picture I see my father in him.  I see me in him.  I know him.

Mr. Smith’s great grandfather is a tick mark on a slave schedule. There are no names, only ages and gender.  In 1860, Robert Smith owned eleven slaves, six of whom were under the age of 12.  The youngest two were boys—one a year old, the other six months old.  Either could have been Mr. Smith’s great-grandfather.  Or neither.  Robert Smith gave his slaves to his children as gifts when they married.  Perhaps Mr. Smith’s great grandfather went with one of them.  Perhaps not.  He has not found a picture of him.  At least not yet.

We know where we end.  We don’t know where we begin.  I realized that this man’s story begins in pain.  I’m sure he thinks of his ancestors fondly, but he cannot think of them without thinking of the horror of slavery, the brutality of reconstruction, and the injustice of Jim Crow.  And now I understand why his father, aunts and uncles wouldn’t talk about it. 

Now it makes sense.  

Roses in December

I answered the phone at work the other day and was most pleasantly surprised to hear the voice of an old friend on the other line. Robynn Holland was calling to see if I'd be interested in providing a genealogy workshop for teachers under the auspices of the Georgia Humanities Council. I jumped at the chance, not only because I'm a total genealogy nerd, but because I'd do most anything for Robynn. She had worked with Randy at Pointe South Middle School while simultaneously dealing with a painful divorce and a cancer diagnosis. Randy thought very, very highly of her and not long after he passed away I got the opportunity to apply for a spot in a Teaching American History grant program that she was directing. She was instrumental in getting me the slot, largely--I think--because she knew I was Randy's widow. I loved working with her throughout the two year program. And it was that program that introduced me to the Atlanta History Center and, ultimately, my dream job. Funny how one opportunity leads to another as we move through life.

Anyway, as we chatted on the phone, catching up with one another's lives, she mentioned how often she still thinks of Randy. She told me that he was a gifted, even brilliant teacher. She said he was the consummate gentleman and what's more, a gentle man. She said he was a tremendous leader--that the administration at the school had been critically weak and that Randy's leadership was instrumental in the day to day workings of the school. She said, "Sue, you know, you lose people now and again in life and it's always sad, but there was something special about Randy. Losing him just rocked me to the core--I still think of him."

Listening to her soothed places in my soul that I didn't even know were raw. There is something about knowing that he lives in other people's memories that somehow makes him alive again in my own. It wasn't four days later that it happened again.

Andy Wood, a dear friend from our days in Spain, arrived for a visit just a few days after my conversation with Robynn. He wasn't in my living room for more than 30 minutes when he directed the conversation to Randy. He told me that he had attended a church leadership meeting many years ago in Cadiz with Randy and that the speaker said that a young man absolutely must serve a mission before even thinking of marriage. Andy was new to the church and was already engaged to his sweetheart, Jenny. This leader's counsel shook him. Andy told me that as he and Randy drove back to Rota together, Randy told him that it was going to be okay. That there were many ways to serve a mission and that if he felt that marriage was the right choice for him, that's what he should do. Then Andy's eyes got a little misty as he went on. He said, "Randy told me that before Jenny and I consummated our marriage, that we should have prayer together. We did. And that really got us started on the right foot." He told me they were small incidents, these two encounters with Randy, but that they had meant the world to him.

James M. Barrie once said, "God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December."

Or March.

Closing page of the 2002 Pointe South Middle School Yearbook:

Taken somewhere in the Black Sea, circa 1988

AAAAACK!!! Has it been almost a YEAR???

Okay, so there's no question I've been neglecting this blog. I've been neglecting it ever since I started it in the middle of that gawd-awful thesis experience. But NINE frigging months is a tad excessive.

And SO much has happened that's worthy of a blog post. I've had a couple of SIGNIFICANT breakthroughs in my family history--each one worthy of its own post.

So here are my New Year's Resolutions. In no particular order:

1. Walk (preferably outside) for at least 20 minutes each day. I've long lost hope that I'll ever lose enough weight to actually LOOK good again, but I can hope to lose enough weight to FEEL reasonably good. The older I get, the worse the damn back, knees, and hands get so I think it's time to make an attempt to at least slow down the decay. I may still be old and fat, but perhaps I can be old, fat, and mobile.

2. Post to each of my two blogs at least once each month. Part of my problem with getting this done is I feel, like Elizabeth Bennett, that I'm "unwilling to speak unless (I) expect to say something that will amaze the whole room..." So if I can't be brilliant and the post can't be perfect, I don't write one. I need to remember--short posts are okay. Posts without multimedia presentations (that take FRICKING FOREVER and thoroughly piss me off) are okay, too.

3. Spend an hour each day (on the days I don't teach) on a family history related project. Sundays are traditionally my dead-people days, and that's when I tend to actually make progress collecting information on my family. I need to spend some time on the other days of the week organizing, preserving, and sharing what I've already found.

4. Reduce the number of people I owe money to by 50%. Right now I owe money to eight different entities. Eight. Shit. We won't discuss how fundamentally pathetic that is since I know better than to let myself get trapped that way. Let's just blame it all on Randy and leave it at that. Oh, and I should perhaps add that this particular goal has reference to the accounts I owe, not the actual people. I am not suggesting that someone take out American Express. Just pay off the account I have with them so that they're no longer on my list of creditors.

Four things. Not bad, eh? Let's see if I can do it.

And now for something completely different....

Comb-overs and air guitars

I discovered my first honest-to-john gray hair about 3 weeks ago, just in time for my 55th birthday. This didn't surprise me much since various and assorted events in the lives of my various and assorted children should have turned me gray about 30 years ago. Finding this gray hair didn't surprise me, but the nature of the hair did. It was thick and wiry and curly. My hair--or hairs, I should say, since I only have about 3 of them--is (are) thin and fine and straight as a board. That is, when they haven't been permed into something resembling a cross between a french poodle and Don King.

But my hate-hate relationship with my hair is not a new development. I have been threatening to shave my head and buy a wig for about 40 years now. My hair's been fine ever since I was a child, but when I was younger I had plenty of it. Now that I'm old, it's becoming more and more challenging to figure out ways to cover the bald spots. Or at least the bald spots I can see in the mirror. I take great pains to avoid looking at my hair from the back. I figure if I can't see it, I'm not gonna worry about it. But it does annoy the hell out of me to spend 30 minutes every morning with a curling iron and hair spray and know that in reality, I'm just indulging in the female version of the comb-over. I'm not fooling anybody. It's time to get a wig. But it won't be my first one.

We lived in San Diego from 1981 to 1984 while Randy served as the Naval intelligence officer for HS-8, a helicopter squadron that was based at North Island Naval Air Station and attached to the aircraft carrier USS Ranger. He left us for a nine month WESTPAC deployment in the summer of 1983, and had no choice but to do his Christmas shopping that year entirely through the catalogs that circulated among the guys on the ship. He bought toys for the kids through the Sears and Penney's catalogs and I'm sure he bought me a few things there as well. But a small package that arrived from him for me just before Christmas that year was wrapped in brown paper and bore a singular return address: Fredericks of Hollywood. Lingerie, I thought with a smile, as I tossed the package at the back of the Christmas tree and promptly forgot about it.

Mother and Daddy came down to San Diego that year for Christmas since I was alone, and it was such a treat to have them there for all the Christmas eve and Christmas morning festivities. My Dad played Santa that morning and handed out the presents, one at a time, just like he did when I was a little girl. The kids were having a blast and I was basking in the holiday glow until Daddy spotted the package at the back of the tree. I shot out of my chair to intercept the forgotten parcel, but before I could whisk it out of his hands, he read the label, handed it to me, and disappeared into the kitchen for a much-needed beer. My mother thought it was hilarious.

I opened enough of the package to discern that it did not, in fact, contain crotchless panties or a black lace teddie--it contained a wig. Relieved, I pulled it out and showed it to the folks until it dawned on me that there were still a number of naughty conclusions that one might draw from the fact that my husband was sending me a wig from Fredericks of Hollywood while he was out to sea. I stuffed it back in the package and under the couch cushions. Daddy got another beer. Mother still thought it was hilarious.

The truth was, Randy had been listening to me bitch about my hair for all the years we'd been married and while he might have been browsing the Frederick's catalog that year with other intentions in mind, he really, honestly, did want to try to fix my hair problem. It was a cute wig--shoulder length curls and in a color that was very near to my own. I tried it on dozens of times, but there was no escaping the fact that--on me--it LOOKED like a wig. I never actually wore it.

But my Frederick's of Hollywood wig DID actually see the light of day--on Randy. While we were living in Spain, our tiny little Rota Servicemen's Branch held a "Come As Your Favorite Fantasy" party (yes, you read that right--we had EXCELLENT parties in Spain!). For this particular party, it was perfectly clear what Randy would go as--he went as a rock star. With my wig, his British motoring cap, and a tennis racket, he played air guitar that would have put Van Halen to shame. I even threw a pair of panties at him. And I have photographic evidence (of the costume, not the panties):

After the party, I put the wig in a bag with some eyeglasses and other accessories from the evening and put it out in the carport. Our Spanish garbagemen accidentally took it out with the trash the next morning. I was heartbroken. I never told Daddy. I figured he'd need another beer.

Soothing the savage beast...

When I updated my blog header last month, one of my favorite features ended up on the cutting room floor. In a fit of pique, I got rid of the little embedded music player from Playlist.com when I forgot my password and the site made it extraordinarily difficult to retrieve it.

I admit I kind of miss it. It was fun to link the music that it played with the subject of my blog posts. I played Tom Lehrer's "Masochism Tango" when I wrote about the final, PAINFUL, stages of finishing my master's thesis. I played "Der Fuhrer's Face" when I wrote about my Dad's time in the 8th Air Force during World War II. I played Jimmy Buffett's "A**hole Song" when I posted about AT&T. It was fun. But the music could actually prove counterproductive since the older I get the harder it is for me to concentrate on writing while music is playing. It didn't used to be that way, but along with sagging boobs, disappearing shoulders, and painful joints, I guess it just goes with the process of aging.

But I LOVE music. I always have. There's a reason why every movie has a soundtrack. Music is the soundtrack of our lives. It always amazes me how a single song can instantly transport me back to a place and time that I never think about until those first few notes begin to play. Suddenly it's as if I'm there again--I can hear and see things I haven't heard or seen in decades--things that no longer exist. I can feel the way I felt then. The years simply evaporate and all of a sudden, I'm there.

I get it naturally. Both my parents loved music and I was raised in a home where it was always playing. Ever since I can remember, the stereo held pride of place in our house. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the first thing they ever bought; it was certainly always the biggest. This is a photo of the first one I remember (incidentally, the photo was taken at Randy's and my first apartment--they had purchased a better, bigger one by the time we married, and we were lucky enough to get the old one. We didn't have a couch, but by golly we had a stereo!)

Some of my fondest and earliest memories are of the music that came out of that stereo on Saturday nights. My childhood Saturdays were special. Our next door neighbors, the Joneses, were my Mom & Dad's best friends. They had a daughter, Susan, who was about my age and she was one of my best friends. Saturday nights meant that stereo would be playing at "the threshold of pain" while all the grownups sat around visiting over glasses of beer and whatever munchies they happened to have on hand. We kids got to stay up late and play outside to the strains of Hawaiian music (my mother was a great fan since she'd lived in Honolulu as a child) or Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald or Sammy Davis, Jr. or Glenn Miller. Or Mitch Miller. To this day, the song "If you knew Susie, like I know Susie" takes my breath away--I can still hear my Dad singing it to me.

Once I hit the teenage years, my soundtrack changed. I still loved my parents' music, but now the Monkees, the Doors, Cream, and the Beach Boys took center stage. Later on they'd be joined by John Denver, Chicago, Jim Croce, and many others. Even now, all these decades later, certain songs will stop me in my tracks, reminding me of singular moments in my life.

I hear "Higher and Higher" by Jackie Wilson, and I'm suddenly driving a car for the very first time, long before it was legal for me to do so, because Daddy thought he was having a heart attack and he wanted me to drive him to the doctor. Have no idea how I made it, but I did. And he did too. But I worried about him for the rest of his life.

I hear John Denver's "Calypso" and I'm standing outside a store in Swansea, Wales, smelling the sea air and looking at my first Welsh love spoon--a gift from my first real hearthrob, Lynn Williams. I still have it. (The spoon, I mean:-)

I hear "You Make Me Feel Brand New" by the Spinners, and I'm dancing with the love of my life at Disneyland, wondering if he's going to be "the one." He was.

I hear "Longer" by Dan Fogelberg and I'm struggling up the stairs to work at the Administration Building at BYU, eight months pregnant with my second child, and marveling at my good fortune to be married to my best friend and bringing another healthy baby into the world.

I hear "El Nino Querido" by the King's Singers and I'm standing at my kitchen window, washing dishes and gazing across the Bay of Cadiz at the lighthouse in Rota while my children make graham cracker gingerbread houses on the table nearby. Bliss. Complete. Total. Utterly perfect. Bliss.

Nowadays I have to be a tad careful about the music I listen to. Some of the songs I just mentioned will bring me to tears, so I balance the sad ones with lots of upbeat stuff. I managed to make it through Randy's funeral with a liberal dose of ZZ-Top--again, at the "threshold of pain"--for an hour or so before the service. When I'm lonely and missing the west, I play a lot of Jimmy Buffett. On Sundays, when I'm hanging out with my favorite dead people, my music of choice is vintage 40's stuff with a smattering of the Smothers Brothers for good measure--they were another perennial favorite of my folks.

So here's a photo of my mom sitting in front of that new stereo they bought when it was many years old--you can see the thing is MASSIVE. And, just for ducks, I bit the bullet and put the music player back in. With a few of my favorites. Enjoy!

How do you like me now?

One free blog background + a longstanding desire to have a customized blog header + $35 that I probably shouldn't have spent = MY NEW LOOK. Whaddyathink? I think it's absolutely smashing!

I gathered a few family artifacts (trying to represent as many branches of my family tree as I could possibly cram into one photograph) and clustered them at one edge of my great-great grandfather's (Colonel's great-grandfather's) shaving stand. A photograph of Mother and Daddy leaving on their honeymoon in June of 1946. A turquoise necklace I made for Mother when I was a little girl. Randy's dogtags and his Navy Achievement Medal. Daddy's glasses. The beaded purse that Ruth's mother made for her when she was a little girl. The little wooden Bavarian-style chair that Colonel hand crafted and then carved Mother & Daddy's initials and marriage date on the seatback.

Once I had them all posed properly, I took a few photographs and my darling baby girl Megan spent some time Photoshopping them until they had that perfect sepia tone with the colors of Randy's medal popping right out of the frame.

Then I scanned several letters from my great-grandmother, Maria Ignacia Ramos Robbins, along with a photo taken on my wedding day at the Los Angeles Temple and one of my favorite pictures of me and my brothers, Chris and Mike.

I e-mailed the whole lot to Heather of BlessedLittleNest.com designs, and the rest, as they say, is history. Now every time I open my blog, I see reminders of so many people and places that made me who I am. And I LOVE that.

So maybe it was money well spent. At the very least, I hope it will inspire me to blog more often. So how DO ya like me now??