The Invincible Summer within us for 2021

 au milieu de l'hiver, j'apprenais enfin qu'il y avait en moi un été invincible

In the midst of strife I found there was within me, an invincible love.  In the midst of tears, I found there was within me an invincible smile.  In the midst of chaos I found there was within me an invincible calm.  In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me, there lay an invincible summer.  And that makes me happy.  For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me there's something stronger...  ~Albert Camus

How beautiful the notion that we have the power to walk through storms with calm and courage.  Albert Camus wrote his poetic words in 1952, several years prior to my own birth, but they resonate in 2020, the year of fear and turmoil for so many around the world.  May 2021 be a year of peace and light.

                                                                       Sunrise at Cedar Point

Patience in genealogy Pays off

Nana and Granddad spread enthusiastic positive energy whenever they entered a room. They were so encouraging and kind that when a cousin married into their family, I adopted them as grandparents. In some small way to repay their kindness over the years, I used genealogy research to reconstruct their German roots ending in my visit to their European hometown where I took a picture of their ancestor's home and church. There was one line in their family trees that stayed empty on the pedigree chart. Granddad grew up longing to know something about his mother's family. His mother avoided the subject of her family and questions asked about ancestry were never answered. As an only child whose father died in WWII, Grandad's questions about family were important to fill the empty spaces. After his mother's death, we looked for clues for several decades hoping to find something in records or artifacts that would tell us where she came from. There was an old school book with a Virginia address inscribed on the front page, a story about her mother named Ruth, and several anecdotes about an old southern plantation that just didn't seem to fit anywhere in the ancestral picture.

Hired researchers, ordered documents, hours online and in archives pouring through records, we always hit brick walls. Suddenly last year Granddad remembered visiting a family in Baltimore on Southern Avenue that he thought might have been relatives. Having long ago run out of any other leads, we looked in census records to see what we could find. Only one family in that area matched the description, so in-depth research on the occupants of that home in Baltimore led to a woman named Ruth... Ruth was the great-great grandma we had been searching for, although it took some detective work to piece together the story. As one clue followed another leading to an online researcher who posted her family tree, collaboration through emails, and finally much anticipated DNA results proved the connection. After so many years of wondering about his roots, Granddad suddenly had live cousins and a robust family tree. At age 91 Granddad knew his mother's story at last bringing peace and forgiveness.

To be ready for the sudden clue it was imperative that we organized our many years of research. The long-lost memory reignited the search for Grandad's family, but the clues meant something as we pieced together the story bit by bit because we had outlined all the known facts over many years. We knew Granddad's mother spent time in the Norfolk, Virginia area from the address in her old textbook so when the Baltimore address led to a study of the family who lived there and we found an uncle who had lived in Norfolk we had a trail of clues to follow.

The uncle from Norfolk had married Ruth Lavinia. It was Ruth's second marriage and we eventually discovered that she had three daughters and a son from her first marriage who were put in an orphanage after her first husband left their home and divorced Ruth. The son died at the orphanage shortly after the children arrived in 1912, the oldest daughter lived until adulthood at the orphanage and workhouse, while another daughter was adopted.

Children's Home Log

It was the adopted daughter's descendants who submitted DNA testing and posted their family tree online which led to the orphanage records and showed the 4th child of Ruth, Granddad's mother, taken to the orphanage at age 5. The birthday and given name were exact and then we were able to trace forward through Norfolk and Baltimore records. Ruth had gone back to the orphanage looking for her children after almost ten years and her remarriage. Her son was dead, and one daughter was adopted so she took Granddad's mother to live with her in Norfolk.

The descendants of Ruth's adopted daughter shared the few recollections about the children's orphanage experience they could glean out of conversations over many years. Although reticent to talk about those years, she said it was cold the day the children arrived at the facility and the siblings were separated upon arrival. The work of cleaning and washing was difficult for the children and there was no love in the place. Those few memories are sobering to all of Ruth's descendants as we remember those four children with breaking hearts.

Children's Home

Without the kindness of genealogy collaboration with strangers met online, the story of Ruth and her children might never have made its way to Granddad who needed to know the bleakness of his mother's childhood in order to fully forgive her fabrications and evasions in questions about family history. Patience this time paid off along with lots of luck, a twinkling of memory, a family hundreds of miles away who took DNA tests and were willing to share their stories, and hours of careful research in documents that fit together with years of organized clues. Patience in genealogy sometimes pays off.

Part of Me: How DNA helps solve the mystery

A part of me was missing. There was an empty branch on the family tree hanging on my office wall. I've done genealogy research for 30 years, but the beautiful ancestral document looked lopsided each time I passed by.  My mother was missing a grandfather. 

This was more than a search to fill in the blanks on a paper pedigree, it was the research I needed to do to fulfill a promise I made in honor of my mother and her father who both missed out on important people in their lives. That loss changed them, made them different than they would have been with a complete family and that difference was passed down through generations who may not have realized the empty space but were missing a part of a complete family. That loss has consequences, less confidence and sense of self...

The finding of names and dates of ancestors does not make up for not knowing them in life, but it helps complete the circle. We know better where the parts of our inner selves came from and who helped make up our DNA, where we got our blue eyes and crooked smiles.

For more than 20 years I read every document on Illinois genealogy and Scots-Irish ancestry I could find. In the early days, I mailed letters asking for information and waited by the mailbox for replies. I traveled to repositories and called every historical society, Church, or governmental agency that might have any information that would lead to the Lost ancestor. With the advent of the internet, I spent hours in the middle of the night searching and then emailing and then... DNA...

Running to the post office with the test kit and waiting for the day the answer would come with who we were related to was not the reality. It took several years of learning the methodology of DNA analysis and contacting distant cousins with whom I shared ancestry, building family trees, and comparing them to try to find the missing link.

And then last Saturday like a wave speeding towards the shore and raising up out of the ocean about to crash onto the sand- I could feel it about to happen. Those last few minutes of anticipation before I turned the final page and years of research and analysis of reams of data crashed all at once.

My mother has a grandfather. It's too late for any change in her life. The ripples throughout the family generations are already in motion and truthfully just knowing a name and a date would not have given my grandfather a Dad, but now I know where he got his blue eyes which he passed on to his daughter and then I passed to my oldest son. And we know we are related to Daniel Boone and many Illinois pioneers and Scots-Irish ancestors who will fill in the blanks of my beautiful family tree. If it weren't for their lives,  there wouldn't be me. I am no longer missing a part of me.

Remembering Ruth...a journey to find the ancestor for a friend in August 2010

     Exhausted after hours in the city archives pouring through microfilm for records,  I fought the beginning of a headache and suddenly realized I hadn't stopped to eat all day.  Earlier that day I had used my new smartphone and followed Google Maps for the first time.  Using the data gleaned from death certificates I toured the city looking for family sites from the ancestry of a friend.  What I needed were sustenance and some relaxation, so I did an online search for a nice restaurant in Knoxville. I sat in a large padded circular booth with tea candles flickering in the darkened restaurant and ordered a special dinner with all the fixings. The quiet elegance set the mood for reflection on all my discoveries that day and I began to brainstorm on the paper napkin in front of me...

     On the Northern heights of Knoxville, looking down over the city and the Tennessee River is a neighborhood called Mechanicsville tucked in between Knoxville College and the interstate.  The street names and some of the buildings have changed over the years, homes razed for public parks and factories turned into parking lots, but families still sit on the front porches and call out to one another while boys play ball in the street.  It was into this working-class neighborhood that the Clark family moved in 1917 from Lancaster County, South Carolina.   They made a new life getting work as laborers and renting a home on Maria Street just a block from the Knoxville College grounds. 

The extended Clark family all set about the chores of daily life, joining local churches, sending the children to school, and all the adults to labor in nearby factories.  They struggled together through misfortunes that would test the fabric of any family.  From 1918 until 1929 at least 3 of William Clark’s grandchildren died along with his wife and daughter-in-law. William never owned his own home, did not have enough personal property for probate or will when he died, and suffered much loss, but he worked hard at his various jobs and lived throughout the years putting a roof over the heads of several generations of the Clark family often living in the Maria Street house at the same time.

From the Mechanicsville neighborhood, Western Ave turns south towards downtown Knoxville and then west through increasingly rural scenery. Turning west again onto Keith Road the houses move further apart and the road narrows.  On the right, a pair of tumbling-down pillars marks an old entranceway with no sign.  A rutted, dirt road covered with oyster shells that crunch under car tires winds uphill around unkempt grounds and drooping trees through the neglected Longview cemetery. 

There is no record of a headstone, but one of William Clark’s grandchildren, Ruth, was buried there.  She died soon after the family moved to Tennessee.  The graveyard is in a quiet section of Western Knoxville across from a small tree-filled park where children play on a new playground.  The voices of youngsters nearby remind us that 3-year-old Ruth Clark was buried here in 1918 all alone several miles west of her neighborhood.  During the decade after Ruth died, several more Clark children died as did their mother, Ola, and they were buried to the East of Knoxville in the Knoxville County Cemetery for Paupers without headstones to mark their graves.  Then Grandmother, Mariah, died in 1929.  The remaining Clark children looked to extended family for mentors and care while their father and grandfather continued to labor hard for their family.

   

Longview Cemetery, Knoxville

       The setting sun sent shadows across the uneven ground which highlighted the tilt of many tombstones, broken tree branches, and potholes in the driveway.  But the birds sang sweet songs and the air was still, the crape myrtle bloomed in yards nearby, and God watches over Ruth, and we remember her…

A Place from my past in First Person

Deale, Maryland is a precious antique.  A treasure from a bygone era where change comes slowly.  A place where party line phones and rural route mail delivery lasted until the 21^st century.  I spent my summers there, twenty miles south of Annapolis, on the Chesapeake Bay.  I stepped back into the past each June into a peaceful village to emerge each September well-rested.  Most folks in southern Maryland during the last decades of the 20th century still made their livings on farms or fishing and oyster boats.  Their speech was laced with a southern accent and the pace of life was slow and steady and folks waved and called each other by name.   The town sits on Rockhold Creek about a mile upstream from the Herring Bay Inlet of the Chesapeake Bay.  It was originally owned by the Gott family who purchased land from Lord Baltimore.  They farmed 600 acres and over time sold off the land closest to the water to retiring ship captains.  Captain Deale brought the largest property and his descendants still live in the area.

                My best memories of the town were from the 1970s when I could ride my bike everywhere.  The center of the village was a crossroads with several businesses patronized by Deale residents.  The local post office delivered mail and gossip just like all small towns.  Everyone was recognized or checked out by the locals.  Next door was the local quick mart called Highs where I rode every day to buy a rootbeer float.  There were two gas stations at either end of town where in 1980 I sat in line for several hours with all the car owners in Deale waiting for the rationed several gallons of gas during the national gas crisis.  Only in a small town, it was more like a party - everyone sitting on their car hood shooting the breeze and enjoying the day.

                There was a small store for boating supplies called Brown Boys, a pharmacy, and a dry goods store called the Deale shop run by the owner and her 3 daughters.  The bookmobile was a van that brought collections of books into town several times per month to check out and read.  They came from the county library system out of Annapolis.  A library building wasn’t put up until 1968.  A Mr. Smith ran the grocery store in across from the Deale Shop and he got to know his customers by name.  Credit was never a problem if you ran a little short.  Outside of the village center were two marinas: Gates and Berlitz‘s, and two liquor stores: Parks and Captain Kidd’s, satisfying both the daytime and nighttime activities of Deale’s residents.  Unfortunately in 1974, the national legal drinking age was lowered to 18 and all the young folks in the town took advantage of it.

                The real center of the town was the fire hall where most of the males over the age of 16 hung out and waited for the alarm. Each summer the backyard of the fire hall was turned into a wonderland at night of hanging Christmas bulbs that lit up booths for games to win stuffed animals, glass plates, or goldfish.  The carnival rides ran late into the night and the trash from hot dogs and popcorn-filled dumpsters all over town.  Wednesday night of carnival week was parade night.  We set up lawn chairs before dinner and ate sandwiches from a cooler saving the best seats for a front-row view.  The bands and baton twirlers paraded for hours coming from all over the state and walking over a mile ending at the firehouse.  I practiced twirling and high kicks for weeks after the parade every summer.

                The Methodists set up churches near the coast for watermen in the 1800s and the Episcopal Churches were populated by the large landowners who farmed.  Deale center had the simple wooden buildings of the Cedar Grove Methodist Church where I attended the vacation Bible School.  St. James Episcopal was several miles away and had the oldest dates in their graveyard.  That church was a fancy brick building with pretty windows and a nice church hall.  Outside of town near St. James were farms where my family bought sweet corn and fresh tomatoes all summer.  Along the road stood tobacco barns and horse stables all in disrepair.  Only in recent years have the old buildings come down to make way for sod farms.

                Because the drive to a movie theatre or bowling alley was 45 minutes, the kids in Deale hung out at Highs parking lot in town.  We bought sodas and snacks and sat on the car hoods gabbing all evening.  Someone would chase another around the cars until they tired and of course, then worked up a thirst for another soda.  Adults never bothered us, I wonder if they thought it was good to keep us in sight.  Sunday afternoons we met behind the elementary school and played baseball or football.  I always watched - yelling for everyone equally.  It was great fun just hanging out.           

                The most popular businesses in Deale on weekends in the summer were the seafood restaurants.  There was Happy Harbor on the creek in town that had a busy bar area, Skippers Pier near the mouth of the creek with a view of the Bay, and the fancy SkipJack restaurant named after the working sailboats on the Bay.  I loved to order dozens of cooked crabs with my friends and all sit around a very messy table cracking crabs and drinking soda or beer.  We sometimes sat out on the dock till the mosquitoes got bad.  The smell of gas and oil mixture from the docking boats and the screaming of gulls fighting for leftovers combined with the chirps of crickets from the marshes trigger wonderful summer memories.  I had a friend who worked in the kitchen of Skippers and drove his small boat to work from his home across the creek.  One night he gave my friend and me a ride home and realized he didn’t have enough gas to get home himself. He put straight oil in the gas tank, somehow getting home, but ruined his motor.  He hadn’t wanted two girls to walk home in the dark, but his gallant efforts cost him a fortune in repairs.

                My home was a mile from town set on a peninsula jutting into the Chesapeake Bay.  Herring Bay Inlet was to the West and the mouth of Rockhold Creek to the east divided by a long stone jetty.  The rocks had been laid by the federal government as a breakwater in 1939.  An old duck blind was constructed near the end of the jetty years ago by the local watermen who also liked to hunt.  The house is a gabled, white, wooden farmhouse with green working shutters and sagging doorways.  Some of the windows have old glass with waves running through and the shutters close up in the winter and during storms.  A real estate agent some years ago said the land was worth a fortune but the house was worth nothing.  I tend to think it just has a worn, well-used look.  Additions and levels were added over the years and storms have taken things away.  We lost the old dairy and the lawn mower barn in 2003 with hurricane Isabelle.

                Each summer first thing my cousins and I got out the crab nets and made repairs.  We placed a wooden bushel basket in an old inner tube and tied it to our waists with a long cord. We made our way down the stone steps of the bulkhead out front and stepped into the water at low tide.  The bottom of the Bay was thick black muck and our feet stuck to the bottom and made sucking noises as we walked looking down through the seaweed for crabs.  Doublers were best and my grandmother liked it when we found soft shells - crabs that had just lost their shell and could be fried and eaten whole (by the older folks in the family…)  I loved catching the crabs and playing in the water and of course eating them, but I hated to listen to my Aunt Mary cook them live as they scratched the lid of the pot.  She shook Bay seasoning into the boiling water and dumped in the crabs.  I always had to catch at least a dozen crabs to make it worthwhile cooking them up.  When the sea nettles got bad with their long stingers as the heat of the dry summers made the water salty, I switched to catching crabs with metal traps baited with chicken necks and thrown overboard off our pier.  Sometimes we sat in the rowboat and crabbed overboard using our nets.  Our big thrill when we were young was packing a picnic and rowing to an old dock a short distance up the creek.  We were never out of sight of the house but felt grown up and adventurous.  

                My father bought an old tent at an army navy store and we put it up in the yard for a playhouse.  Rain or shine my cousins and I set up our Barbie doll houses in the tent and played dolls for hours.  We had two playsets with swings and climbing bars and a much-used sandbox with a heavy wooden lid.  The box was built next to the old wooden tool shed that housed my great-grandfather’s ancient collection.  It was never saved for show or antique value but was really used by all the family when repairs were needed.  My great-grandmother always had a garden with corn, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes.  Years after she died and no one planted anymore we still called it the garden, now just a field of grass along the waterfront.  There were several old trees with a wire line between them that was used as a dog run for my uncle’s golden retriever, Sam.  I disliked the holly tree because the dropped leaves pricked my bare feet.

                My favorite spot on our property was the old wooden pier that stretched out from the land into the mouth of Rockhold Creek.  Boats go by that pier all day in the summer to get from the secure marinas on the creek into the Chesapeake.  I especially loved the sailboats with colored sails that whipped wildly as the boats rounded the stone jetty and headed for deep water.  Whitecaps would crash into the rocks shooting spray and seaweed.  I often saw osprey nests in the buoy light in the creek.  The birds were fiercely protective of those nests diving toward anyone who came too close.  Teachers over the years would ask for essays about a favorite place and I always wrote about the peace of sitting on that pier feeling close to nature, watching the sunsets, and praying.  Many times I have gone back to visit and never leave without a walk to the pier which is where I established a relationship with God and go back to reconnect.