Oral History

From time to time I go online and research relatives.The older I get, the more I want to know about the people who were here before me. In my mind it’s a way of telling these long-gone people I remember them and I hope others will remember me too. My nephew’s wife has painstakingly done an enormous amount of work on her husband’s family which understandably includes my family. She generously shared her results and I’ve been able to concentrate lately on my husband’s genealogy.  So now on both sides of the family I have lots of names, birth dates, death dates, and locations in this country and Europe and Scandinavia. What I don’t have is very many personal details. What were their hopes and dreams? Were they happy? Sad? Was life hard or a series of unexpected stumbles? Due to the influenza pandemic after World War I, my maternal grandparents died when my mother was still a child. My father’s mother endured the death of her first child, a fire that burned her house to the ground, the horror of one of her sons taking his own life, and the death of her husband, killed by a bull on the family farm. Lots of tragedies. She wasn’t one to reminisce about the past, nor was my dad.  One of my mother’s aunts who was born in the late 1800’s, at age 18 took a stagecoach all the way from Wisconsin to Oklahoma City by herself to visit her newly married sister. What bravery. I’ve been told the grandmother I didn’t know passed on to me my love of bread baking. And that she liked to laugh. An uncle ran away, joined the navy and spent World War II in England, where he met his future wife.. A grandfather of my husband would now certainly be known as a “player”. A mysterious biological child of his has turned up in my research. There are so many stories that were handed down and so many I know I never heard.There’s a page in Ancestry to add notes but I don’t feel like it does real justice to them. I long for more.

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