Stories My Mother Never Told

I don’t remember my parents telling many “fun” stories about their childhoods. Or maybe it’s just that the less than fun stories are what stuck in my head. There’s dad talking about how his sister’s Christmas cat decided to relieve itself all over his presents under the tree one year. There’s mom talking about the two dresses she had during high school, or coming home from first grade and getting slapped for saying “Hello.” Her Italian-speaking mother thought she was cursing.

So I was delightfully surprised to run across yearbooks on Ancestry.com and get to know my mother in her junior and senior high school personas. I may never remember her reading except for newspapers and when she read to my brother and me, but she loved reading and golf! (The golf I do recall, simply because it seemed in the 1960s so out of character for a poor immigrant kid whose father was literally paid in pennies so it would seem like more to have even known about the game.) And this woman who never once do I remember pursuing exercise just for the sake of exercise belonged to the hiking club. Who knew?

In the photos, she still has that somewhat shy smile I usually associate with the class outsiders. Yet, she was the secretary of her homeroom at old Rockford High. But the biggest surprise was that I inherited, according to the yearbook characterization, her view of the world and how to interact in it—“a cheery smile and pleasant word to all.”

The lesson I most learned from my parents was two-fold. Life isn’t always the way we wish it would be, but our approach to it can make whatever it is better or worse. They tended to choose better—their lot was better than what their parents faced. They wanted ours—my brother’s and mine—to be better yet. My parents, for all the bad times and good in their own lives, managed to raise survivors—children able to cope with the world they found and do things within their power to make it the world they wanted. Not a bad epitaph for two Depression-raised outsiders.

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Elusive Matriarchs

I came back from last week’s Illinois State Genealogical Society Fall Conference re-energized about breaking through some of my personal brick walls of actually finding women in my father’s family. Most of them do not appear in writing anywhere until sometime after taking their husband’s surname. So my paternal line is filled with first name only women and sketchy details of their lives before marriage.

Which is what brought me to the search for Great-Grandma Jennie’s mother and my first serious roadblock—and ultimate triumph—in genealogy research a few years ago. I found this woman in the 1860 US Census listed simply as “Manervy,” wife of Garret Garretson.  In 1870, she's listed with him and their  two daughters Jennie and Alba. Ten years later, she was Minerva, living in the same place with the same man, around the same other Garretson families, with one daughter Jennie and born in New York in about 1832. And ten years after that, in 1880, she was nowhere to be found in the Michigan Census; her daughter Jennie was a milliner in another Michigan town. Minerva reappears later and died in 1904, which gave me the first clue. I found her death certificate! Her father was Thomas Armstrong.

So, backtracking through New York and Michigan indexes I managed to find her, along with her mother, step-mother and eight natural siblings and three step siblings: Minerva, second daughter of Thomas A. Armstrong and Laura Fosmire. The family migrated to Michigan, where Thomas eventually remarried following the death of his first wife. Minerva married into the Garretson clan.

Now for challenge number two—which New Jersey Garretson’s are these folks? It’s a fairly common name in several NJ counties, dating back to before the American Revolution in some of them. And that’s where I am now—looking for my particularly elusive Garret Garretson, son of (surprise!) Garret and perhaps his second wife Lillis Wood. Or maybe, like his brother Freeland, the elusive Ellen Vreeland from New Jersey was his mother?

It’s solving these sorts of mysteries that makes genealogy such an engrossing hobby!

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