FamilyTies

  One week ago. I was hanging out with my partner, knowing that seeing my mom’s name pop up on my phone at midnight could only mean one thing: the day my family had been anticipating for a week had finally come and my Nana had passed. She crossed the veil in peace, My Nana. She was surrounded by her kids and their partners. She was loved, tended to, sung over, prayed over and made to be perfectly comfortable and at peace in her last days and hours. I had less than a day to pack up myself and my 3 children to get down to my parents’ home in Tennessee. It’s an 8 hour drive at least, but I somehow made it in 11. It was a very long day, the next day would be even longer and even more emotional.  The day of the funeral went like this: we dropped the kids off at my aunt’s house in the morning, drove to the church I grew up going to to pick up food for the family, then out to the middle of nowhere to the little Tennessee town my Nana had lived her last year in. Once my Nana broke her...

  When I was in high school, we were very poor. We had almost nothing to our names and we lived in this tiny 864 square foot house in the middle of the Charleston, Tennessee countryside. I’ve never lived in a more beautiful place, but those were bittersweet times for my family. In the fall of 2003, my senior year of high school, I had the opportunity to go to London with my high school band. Being as poor as we were I would have never been able to afford to go without the loving generosity of our neighbors, who have been family friends for decades. I won’t ever forget the kindness that allowed me to go on that trip. It didn’t exactly go to plan. I didn’t think about the fact that I am terribly prone to motion sickness and how that would translate to air travel. Apparently I get altitude sickness. And apparently it takes arriving back in the States for me to get over it. The band marched in the New Year's Day parade, and being a non-marching member of the band, I marched in the fron...

  My brother is probably one of my best friends. He understands me in a way that few people do, can irritate me quicker than anyone but also is a comfort in his way. We always know how to make each other laugh and have more inside jokes than we know what to do with. We have some fantastic examples in our lives of siblings who are always there for each other in my parents’ siblings. I think it’s probably a rare thing to grow up close to all your aunts and uncles and cousins the way we got to. My dad has one sister and we were always up at her house spending time with her and my cousin. My mom has 4 sisters and a brother and they’re ALWAYS talking to each other - it’s a wild group chat.  There's a long history in our family of close siblings, on both sides of the family. Even if they lived far apart, there are stories of support and generosity between them. Our grandfather had a ton of siblings, our grandmothers each had one brother, and our other grandfather has one sister. All...

  One of my favorite things about starting this blog is that my Nana has called me three different times in 2 weeks, my uncle called me to say how much he’s enjoying all the stories, and even my dad has texted about it. And he doesn’t do the texting so much. I’m so glad they’re enjoying the stories - which I admittedly get very geeky about. And hopefully you’re enjoying them, too. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here in the first place, putting eyes on this lil blog of mine. I have another story for you today. On one of my phone calls from the Nana, she asked me about her great uncle. She couldn’t remember his name but told me who he was. I looked him up while I was on the phone with her, and said his name, which she said YES that’s him. She told me he’d gone to Harvard and had lived overseas in Sweden, she’d thought. So I went ahead and did some digging on the guy to see what we could find. I found him really interesting, so I’d like to introduce you to my 3x great uncle, Harris Eastman...

  Now. No one panic. I’m not a necromancer. At least, not in the magical way. Lemme ‘splain. I live near Richmond, Virginia and it’s a very historically significant place in the South, and in the US in general. It’s been the home to many famous people, some of them presidents. I have sad news though. They’re almost all dead. And if they were a president and/or famous they were probably buried at Hollywood Cemetery in Oregon Hill, a Richmond neighborhood. Hollywood Cemetery was first opened up for use in 1847 from land donated to Richmond by William Byrd, for whom Byrd park is named. It has a vast, rolling, gothic landscape and the western side overlooks the river. At the top of the hill, overlooking the river, is my favorite spot to sit. I like to sit and enjoy the view, but I also love being amongst the graves. Let me tell you why. Some people, when they come to a cemetery or graveyard (burial ground attached to a church), they go as a matter of remembrance. If it’s just to look a...

**TW: Infant Loss** I’m currently working from an in-between stage of this blog. I don’t yet have my big project, but I was so excited I started writing about it immediately. I have another couple  months before all of that information is in my hands. I talked to my Nana yesterday and told her I couldn’t wait to get started on this, that I was salivating. She said I shouldn’t do that, but that she was happy I was excited. Again…ya girl is extra.  So in the interim, I’ve decided to explore thoughts, ideas, and feelings about everything I’m learning. There are of course people I’m going to relate more to than others - like my relatives who were domestically inclined and active with their kids vs. the American Vice Consulate to Arabia. Of course I’m going to relate to the stay-at-home mom more than the well-traveled (and my imagination *sings* that the man had a mustache…he HAD to, right??) well-connected 3x great uncle. Among the themes and feelings I’ve felt I’ve needed to spea...

  My Nana called me after I’d written a piece about one of her ancestors to say how much she’d liked it, which of course meant the world. And in the meantime between now and when mom and dad bring the family tree up, she gave me a couple of missing people to find. She told me that her grandfather had an affair while married to her grandmother, who was beloved to my Nana, and her grandmother subsequently divorced him. We knew that the mistress had come to her grandfather, telling him she was pregnant and that the child was his. And we knew the child’s name. Other than that, she had no information and had always wondered what had happened to her. I went back to ye olde family tree and searched for this grandfather’s name. I found it. And I found his divorce record, his death record…as well has his marriage record to this mistress. I plugged in the name we’d had and found the missing daughter and all her half-siblings. My grandfather had married his mistress and spent the last three y...

  My Dad’s side of the family is full of gear heads and at least one truck driver. I grew up going to car shows, hearing about radiators and drum brakes and engines. I couldn’t really tell you one thing from the other, but I know enough to keep up with a conversation. I didn’t realize how many pictures I have of relatives posing with their cars till I started this research and really dug into all the archives of pictures. If you know what some of these cars are, please do tell! I don’t have my Grampaw on-hand to tell me, and I bet he knows every last one of them. Nana & Uncle Quinn Buying a car was a massive investment and a sign of social status, rather than the over-priced necessity it is today. We still use them as symbols of class and status, but in the brands rather than just the fact that we have one.  Grampaw Hoyt (HD) Every time my hubs has a day off, he does exactly what Grampaw is doing here, washing his car. I have very distinct memories of my dad washing his...

  In learning about my family’s history and looking through the archive of pictures my aunt keeps, there are certain people who are just compelling. I can’t quite put my finger on why, the look of their faces, the mystery of their life, the glamor of it, or maybe even the sadness in their wake. Today’s spotlight is one that just caught my eye. I don’t know why, maybe because she’s so stunning. I’d love to introduce you to my great-great-grandmother, Bertha May Watson Sawyer. Bertha was born to George and Susan Watson in 1879 in Boston. She grew up well, going to the local schools and eventually an all girl’s school. She had one brother, Arthur, who was a businessman and consulate to, what was then, Arabia. She had 2 sons, my great-grandfather Richard and his brother Gilman. As you can see from these two pictures side-by-side, her health deteriorated rather quickly. My Nana told the story of how she had diabetes and it took her life very quickly. A mere 7 years later after her death...

  I feel like most people who read these days have some understanding of the massive impact that the Outlander series has had on the literary scene. I loved the first book, then found the subsequent books too sloggy and slow-paced. However, I am MADLY in love with Jamie Fraser, the king of men (and the *completely fictional* main character in the Outlander series). Before I even set eyes on those books I’d fallen MADLY in love with the idea of Scotland. I’m not sure if it's due to the idyllic setting it offers to the medieval smut that I adore or if it’s genuinely the magic in the landscape. The beauty of that country convinced Queen Victoria to love it and buy Balmoral for herself and her family, calling it "the proudest, finest country in the world". I just have this feeling that if I ever get to visit Scotland I will not want to leave. There's this show that comes on UK television called Escape to the Country, where families who live in UK cities want to buy homes ...

  My mom’s family, very nearly every single one of them on both her mother’s and father’s side live in Pennsylvania. She was born in a tiny, idyllic town northeast of Erie called…well…North East. North East is home to many many vineyards, small farms, a quaint township, and some of my family’s favorite people on the planet, among them are Dave and Marge Montgomery. Uncle Dave is my deceased Gramma’s brother and knew her better than just about anyone, which makes him a precious commodity indeed. His life stories are coveted remembrances among those of us who knew her. Uncle Dave lives on the family homestead, and has for many many years. That home belonged to his grandfather and holds enough precious memories to fill all of Lake Erie. Once I had dug into my family tree I realized that I had huge chunks of missing information about people that I was curious about. I used every tactic in my niecely trick bag to bribe my great-uncle into divulging details about the family I had questio...

One of the interesting things you come across when you start to research family trees is the massive difference in record keeping depending on the regions you’re looking in. I have to say that I'm a bit spoiled, not only from the work of previous generations, but because the majority of my family is from New England. I’m sure it’s because those states are much older and have been colonized for a longer amount of time. The family was based mostly in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and a little bit of Maine. I even have some ancestors that immigrated from Northern Ireland to Truro, Nova Scotia as grantees. Evidently they helped to found the city. To my surprise, though maybe it shouldn't have been, while researching my husband’s tree, I found that every single person I came across, like 8 or 9 generations back on either side of his family, were LITERALLY ALL from Virginia. Like, ALL of them.  A place where all my research (and anyone else’s who has looked into it) has...

  I’ve been sitting here staring at my computer screen for a hot minute, trying to figure out how to say what I want to say. That’s the trouble with writing. Why write if you have nothing to say, but conversely (and herein lies my problem), how can I possibly write when I have all these words in my head screaming to get out. As I sort through the thought tornado spinning wildly out of control through the grooves of my, today, insufficiently outfitted gray matter, I just decided to start typing. I just got a brand new keyboard that makes the most delightful typing sounds. I’m very happy with the tactile feel of the keys and the rainbow leds lighting it from underneath. My kids are somewhat occupied for the time being, somehow, so I have a moment to begin to collect my thoughts and ideas about how I want to move forward on this blog. . I have come upon a sort of project. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I am utterly obsessed with genealogy. I constantly live with one t...