On Family Trees

On Family Trees

I don't know exactly what possessed me to start digging into my past, but I have. I've joined a website which promises access to information, at a price per year, of course. Well, a family history is priceless, or so I thought. So every time I try to look up a distant relative I'm told "there are 427,000" names which match. Good grief, so much for being unique. I check the column which tells me they will search the obituaries, gee, if I need to know someone who was born in 1827 is dead, then I must be an idiot. Besides that, it's an addition charge.

You do find out some things of course, mostly through census records, which are quite interesting in and of themselves. At least they are included in the yearly price. I never realized, for instance, how much American handwriting has deteriorated over the past 100 years give or take some. For instance, looking through the census reports say in 1910, I'm astonished how great the penmanship was, and even in the 1800's I could read every handwritten name, clearly. Ever try to decipher a handwritten letter now? Granted, only a few of us are literate enough to even write or read these days, still, what do they teach in school? I can remember in the 1950's practicing each letter of the alphabet, upper and lower case, until my little hand hurt. I suppose these days that hand pain would be cause for something they call "carpal tunnel syndrome.” I’m sure these days some crafty lawyer could find a way to sue the teacher for "cruel and unusual punishment” if she made them do this. Imagine the little elementary students all walking around in those hand braces.

Ok, finally I wade through all of the beautiful handwriting to find my grandfather, only to see that he spelled my mother's name wrong! She was listed as Lesley, not the Leslee I’d grown up knowing. Ok, he was a traveling salesman, maybe he wasn't present for the naming, I tell myself. Then I wonder, did mom change the spelling? She died last year, no opportunity to ask now. Hmmm, time to go the file cabinet my dad has, he's out of town, he won't mind if I do a little nosing around.

So off I go on my new adventure, the quest for the correct spelling. Once at dad's, I unlocked the file cabinet. Everything is in neat little folders, all labeled, things like Last Will and Testament, Insurance Papers, Garden Club, phone bills, Christmas Card List........I'm beginning to think where do I have all of this kind of information? In a kitchen drawer, or some mouse eaten cardboard box? No silly, you have a file cabinet too! Reminder to self, check my file cabinet to see if I am so organized. I keep thumbing through files, when I see PERSONAL........Bingo, this has to be it. I extract the file easily even though it's kind of big. What the heck.....first thing I see is a military paper of my fathers, saying "We are sending back the letter about your name change, we need this information notarized." Huh? I read on, seems like dad changed his name too. Here's the birth certificate.......Born Nov. 12, 1926, male child (alive), name....Andrew Gump Pearson. Wait a minute, my dad is Terry Euell Pearson. I look again at the letter, it states to the military that an error was made on the certificate and should read Terry Euell Pearson. Well, it seems like they accepted him into the military with his name, yet in order for them to send him out of the country to use this training, his word on his name was not good enough. Dad had gotten a notarized letter from his mother stating that indeed, the name was an error and please, let him fly! Ah, the innocence of it all. It must have worked fine, because soon he was flying over Japan.

Now that this matter was cleared up it was time to find my mother’s birth certificate. Yikes! It’s déjà vu all over again! There was no birth certificate, yet once again a small letter to the government with a notarized letter from my grandmother saying that yes, she swears my mother’s name is actually Leslee, therefore the government could let her join her husband overseas. Well, that seemed easy enough, and certainly explained how I came to be born in Japan.

Nosing around these files I found all sorts of things, a newspaper clipping announcing my parents’ marriage, interesting reading to be sure, but the most interesting tidbit was where they intended to honeymoon, in Mexico! Well, at least I thought it amusing that in 1945 they chose Mexico. It’s not like they’d be parasailing on the beach at Mazatlan. I’ll have to ask dad about that trip. “Hey dad, did you and mom get the “touristas?” I could have stayed for hours looking at all of that stuff, but I had real work to do, so back home for now.

Continuing my quest for relatives I found some of the most interesting named relatives. Mammoth Orelse, my goodness, what a name! I noticed he was the eighth child born into one great-aunt’s family. That led to the thought that either they were all out of names at that point, or he had been one big baby. I imagined her pushing to the demands of the midwife, screaming in pain to eject this baby dinosaur, then upon doing so hearing the midwife say, “He is mammoth!” To which my great aunt wearily said, “my son is Mammoth…Or else I just gave birth to a grown man.” Surely that recorder of names on the birth certificate didn’t bother to clarify anything. Made me want to see what he named his children, but first, I need to go look in my own file cabinet, I suspect I’ll have another adventure trying to sort it all out. Thanks mom.

I waited for the sound of ringing, hoping my Dad would pick up. I hated calling him on his vacation, but I had a need to know if it was true that he and Mom went to Mexico on their honeymoon.
“Hello.” My father’s Texan drawl was comforting.
“Hi Dad, how’s the trip going?”
“Fine, what’s up?” I could hear his lady friend in the background, but that’s a whole other story.
“Oh, I’ve been doing some research into the family tree and I have a question for you.”
“Gee, that’s great, you have a cousin whose been researching it, even been to some of the states digging up information. Hope I can answer your question.” He sounded surprised I was doing this. Little did he know, so was I.
“Well, I am sure you can, it has to do with where you and Mom took your honeymoon…did you go to Mexico?”
He was laughing, “No. We went to Carlsbad Caverns, why?”
Carlsbad Caverns? I couldn’t believe it. “I read in your wedding announcement you would be going to Mexico.”
“You read that where?”
“In an announcement of your wedding.”
And so, now I knew the truth. They visited bats! Funny, when they took me and my brothers on vacation to the caverns it was never mentioned that they had been there before. Maybe we just didn’t listen, which was usual for the three of us. In fact, if memory serves, my brothers wanted to have a pissing contest to see if they could add to the stalactites. Of course it was just silent enough in there for my mother’s amazing ears to hear the sounds of their zippers, and that was that! All we truly cared about was sundown, when supposedly millions of bats would come swirling out of the cavernous darkness and make their nightly feeding rounds. We were not in the least disappointed, it was like a scary movie, the enveloping masses of wings and fangs blocking the sky’s final moments of waning illumination. Silence broken by squeals of delight, whooshing wings, oohs and ahhhs, and some people with their eyes wide shut, or squinting so tightly they’d missed the whole show. Go figure.

Back to the family research. Well, I’ve hit the wall a few times, but then I struck more family gold. It seems Mammoth Orelse wasn’t the only oddly named member of the family. Nope, I found good old Uncle Fountain Blue, buried deeply in another archive I accidentally stumbled on, thanks to the dedicated souls of the Mormon Church. This time it was a freebie! I love the originality of our family names, which I will speak to in greater depth later.

I did find out about my cousin Marion, who at one time was the Alternate Poet Laureate of Texas in 1972. Now I had known this, because I have within my possession two of his books of verses, personally inscribed to “Terry and his.” I will admit that it has taken me years to peruse through them, such a technical writer of poetry he was. In fact, the only reason I actually started reading them was because I was aware that he had put in a poem about my grandfather, Dalton, who died long before I was born. I’d heard from my father, the youngest of 9 surviving children at the time, that he was trampled to death by his own plow horses, coincidently on a Memorial Day. It seems a rabbit spooked his horses. Well, that was my father’s eyewitness account from the back stoop. Not so, according to the Alternate Poet Laureate…..who also gave his accounting. Seems like a foal was misbehaving, seeing his mother in the plow line was just too much and he darted out to be with mommy, causing the ensuing disaster. Being a poet, he was not content to leave it there, the mangled body, the growing crowds of horrified family. He took it further, it was to him a wake-up call to GOD. It was punishment for my grandfather who was, God forbid, plowing not only on Memorial Day, but a Sabbath as well. The punishment was not enough for poor old grandfather, just trying to get the meager crops plowed before the coming rain, intent on feeding his numerous offspring. But a continuation of the punishment to my cousin who took it as a sign from God that he can strike upon will to deliver a message indelible on budding poets. He puts the blame squarely on my grandfather, and subsequent poems show how much more moral he would become, even during the war days of WW2 when arguably, his duties were oh, so rough on Antigua. Yes, those damnable , warm trade winds, the luscious Island girl, tempting him at every turn, begging him to leave her with his child, one to remember this time of her needs. A child who would let her be less lonely. He was flattered? He was disgusted? No, he was full of romantic ideals which did not include some brown beauty with a swollen stomach of the spoils of war he would leave, only to return to the pig-tailed, freckle faced neighbor girl. She would bear the fruit of his seeds, this little farm girl waiting at home for him. Someday though, he’d be forced to plow through his own memories, tortured in his loins, a dream unmade, yet rhymed for the day when the future might take away the word I‘m sure he disdained, “Alternate,“ and give Texas the true messages he took away from Memorial Day 1937.

As I had discovered I had a third cousin who had taken up the search for ancestors too, my dad gave me his phone number, as I was eager to see if he could fill in any blanks. Well, he had done some research in conjunction with another relative whose name escaped him. He was more interested in how my father looks these days, as he put it “Your dad hasn’t changed, he looks as a young as ever.” I could debate that, seeing as I’ve seen him age greatly since my mother’s death just last year, but then why spoil one of his favorite images? I found him very confused, and assuming we were close in age I asked how old he is. “I’m 72.” Well, nearly 20 years between us and I began to suspect Alzheimer’s, which is not the first case in the family. I could see I would not get much, if any real information from him, other than he would send me some photos of my grandparents, together, something I’d not seen before. I am glad we spoke, even if less than satisfying, I had touched base with my past.

I will be checking my mail for those photos, unless he forgot them too, until then I need to speak to my aunt, as I’ve hit the proverbial brick wall on my mother’s side. I’m saddened that I can’t just go out to the oak tree where I scattered her ashes and ask her to fill me in, but then there are a lot of questions I asked of her she never would answer. Her last words to me were, “I’m sorry I was such a bitch.” Oh mom, I guess that’s just another way you left me with so many questions, just too bad about that email…more on that later. Oh, and by the way, mom, when I looked for an engraved stone to place under the oak tree where your ashes lay, all I could find was one which read, “Our Beloved Pet.” Hope you don’t mind if I leave it until a more suitable one comes along.

To be continued....