A Hope For The Future, A Link To The Past
April 2005
It took only
seven fast decades to go from being the baby of the family to
becoming the oldest functioning member of a very large clan.
Still
clear in my memory is hearing again and again, "You're our
hope for the future." It was not only said to me in the thirties
it was said to our classes by teachers; it was mentioned in speeches
when emphasis was on escaping the past and approaching the future
with the raw material our youth would provide.
Maybe
some in the room would rise to the challenge, clothe themselves
in the mantle being draped about their shoulders; but, most of
us took on life one day at a time. That's the way our parents
did it and we were just happy youngsters. Our parents and older
siblings had a sense of responsibility and made sure that our
lives would be better than theirs had been. It's been said, theirs
was the great generation.
Three
years before I was born, the Stock Market crashed and initiated
the great depression, often introduced with capital letters. It
was an era not to be forgotten. The family love and humor would
help me to escape the stigma of poverty that so plagued these
stalwart people in their recent years.
So,
here I am after 70 years, still living happily ever after, dancing
to the music of what happens. One day at a time does add up and
the memories are of delightful things always overtaking the things
I somehow got over, through, around or just rose above. That's
life. I inherited the resiliency they passed down to us without
our having to bear the same burdens.
Suddenly,
though, I have become a source of information. I'm the youngest
of the older generation in our family that came to this country.
As such, I'm being tracked down from far and wide to verify and
identify what younger generations want to know about their heritage.
Before families scattered as they have now, an interested nephew,
niece or cousin could run to grandma or aunt Nellie and just ask.
Today,
emails from veritable strangers arrive, and I do what I can with
what I know to put them on the right track as they search their
family tree on the Internet. Coincidently, our family tree grew
from the very same roots. This, I can help with: birth order,
middle names, a few pictures I have of the homestead where their
forebears grew up and then left to seek their own fortunes - branching
out to wherever their dreams would take them. No problem. I have
that and I'll share it.
But
now, there are ethical questions facing me. Does my knowing something
that someone chose not to tell their children mean I must also
keep the secret? Or, should they know? If they go to records in
the Vital Statistics offices of whatever city they were raised
in, they could find the information and I would be out of it.
Do I direct traffic on the Internet highway? Most of the information
I've kept to myself was learned by just chatting with my mother
while she read long letters from her brothers and sisters. She
would never have unburdened herself if she had predicted we would
one day be communicating instantly to anyone, anywhere in the
world.
Am
I to reveal to a relative seeking roots that these are not those
roots because of adoption? No, I'm not. I even know the name of
the birth family from which the adoptee came and where the desired
roots could be checked. No, I won't be telling that either. This
was from a time when adoption was not an open record. I've decided
not to say anything at all.
I'm
being queried by people three generations beyond the incidents,
yet I feel as if I'm hiding something and, emotionally, it's painful.
I feel like paraphrasing the old remark: "Be careful what
you pray for, you just might get it." I could admonish these
young people to "be careful what you ask for; you may not
like what you hear."
It
works in the reverse, too. They are telling me things about people
I knew but I never knew where life took them. I now have the end
of the stories - sometimes a happy ending; sometimes not.
On
the one hand, this; on the other hand, that. With each generation,
the connection by blood is diminished. The young cousin, acting
as family historian for her family, is a great granddaughter whereas
I am a daughter of the family she seeks. Each of us has a father
and a mother; my mother is my link, her great grandmother is her
connection, two sisters in a large family growing up in the 1880's.
These
young genealogists have mothers and fathers, grandmothers and
grandfathers on each side, daughters have grandmothers and grandfathers,
again on each side, ever widening the path between us and our
common ancestor.
As
a child, I loved being the hope for the future, not knowing where
it would take me. I'm finding that being a link to the past will
take me into just such unknown places again. My memories are sharp
and true to the times; now, however, they are overlapping into
the perceptions others might have as to what happened in the past
to bring them to their present.
I
can provide facts and, of course, I will; but I hesitate to verify
their illusions or perhaps, turn old gossip into historical facts.
They might have come in on the last chapter of the family legend
and only surmised what had gone before. Or, too, they could shatter
my own illusions. No, it's not always comfortable.
What
I savor most about these last seven decades is that they are what
they were; I can't change a minute of it. What comes next will
be what will be. And hasn't it always been thus?
Because
of our penchant for keeping records, whole households, exactly
as they were that year, are listed every decade by name and age,
occupation and religious affiliation. It's the decennial Census
and it's all there for any of us to find. (It's thrilling, it
really is, to visualize the head of household, my Grampa, in 1891,
sitting at the kitchen table and giving information to the local
Census taker - information that I can read now.)
That's
what I want to give to my inquiring cousins, not so much the information,
but the joy of seeking and finding. And, at the risk of looking
as if I don't care enough to do it for them, I will supply their
"link to the past," a cyber link, that is.
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