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...

  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...

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...

If you can believe it, I began talking at a very young age. My Mom says my first full sentence (and it *is* a full sentence, lest you forget) was “NO!” followed closely by “GET IT”. All of which TRACKS cuz ya girl can be opinionated and bossy. Again, I’m hitting with the one-two punches of multiple *shockers* in a row.  Growing up my aunt and my Nana lived together, and would often “kidnap” my brother and I for the weekend. Pretty much as soon as I began to use words my Nana taught me nursery rhymes. I’m not really sure why, but probably because she loves them and learned many as a little girl. She had an old record with nursery rhymes sung to cute lil tunes. I began singing them and begging to play that particular record. A record which, years later, I happened to find while rummaging through the recesses of a record store. The record has many songs I still sing to my kids - “Sing a Song of Sixpence” mostly, which was one of my favorites. Among the nursery rhymes I learned as a we...