IIGS™ Newsletter - January 1999
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IIGS™ Newsletter - January 1999
So there you are -- fresh back from a visit to the Family History Center, with a bunch of newly-found facts about Great-Uncle Luke, and a new lead to Great-Grandmother Elizabeth's maternal grandparents.
Comes the family comments: "That's nice, dear." (from behind a newspaper). Son Jimmy says, "Luke. Luke? I keep forgetting who Luke is -- tell me again." And Kathy says, "I think the stew is done...but I forget what time I started it."
Ah, me.
Lucas, the family blacksheep, has been a research target of yours for months. You even remember Elizabeth and her living room's Tiffany lamps. And now that you're finally closing in on their obscure family backgrounds, no one cares. You let pass the impulse to go mumble to yourself in the back bedroom.
Take heart. Odds are that they do care, and they appreciate your dedication in gathering so much information. But your current family members still have no idea how your lists and wallcharts of names, birthdates, and sources have any relevance to them. It may be nice to know that g-g-g-grandfather Jules fought four years in the Civil War, but Jimmy is still having difficulty comprehending the concept of the Civil War and Kathy hates the word, "war."
It's safe to say that every family tree researcher has faced this situation. You're totally captivated by the mystery and intrigue of your quest. Yet, the stew pot may not get turned on in time to match the schedule of your research afternoons. And the uncooked stew gets more attention than the family facts in your notebook.
There is one solution to all this: Make the information you have relevant to your family members' life and times. Yep, it's that simple. It will require an effort far beyond what you've done, but it can be richly rewarding in recognition of your efforts and a family grasp of what you have learned.
One of the mysteries I encountered in my research was the move of my great great grandfather from a virtual family commune in Ohio to Indiana. On paper, it represents a major schism in a family that had been quite communal for four previous generations. The oldest son split from the family area, almost immediately after his father dies. Nothing on paper gives a rationale for the move, and the split itself meant there were no avenues for anecdotal information to be passed down. Barring breakthroughs in Star Trek-style time travel, I expect the move will always be a mystery among my family.
But I wanted my family to have some understanding of Charles S. Foulks and of the drama of the life and times in which he lived. So I wrote a story.
It begins:
"The Ohio River Valley winter of 1864 had been a tough one, and Charley Foulks knew he would have a long, hard-working spring. The winter wheat crop in the Columbiana County area was almost a total failure from winter-kill, and he had plowed under much of it to plant oats and some potatoes at his place."Worse yet, he had his father's Meigs County farm property to worry about, as well. So, on May 15, 1864, he was packing clothing and tools to make the 160-mile downriver trip from the Columbiana County farm to Meigs County. There, he hoped, the winter had been less harsh, and he could put in some corn and plant potatoes. This year, thankfully, he also did not need to make the trip to Georgetown (another 150 miles) to check the oil well. As his father had expected, it had played itself out."Of course, I had read history books of the Civil War era for a broad perspective of the year. I had been able to glean specific family information from chit-chat between Charley's brothers and their father in letters exchanged while the sons were at Civil War battlefields. (A cousin had preserved the letters for years, but had not tried to relate them to other facts we knew.) Although I have no letters from or to Charley himself, stray comments from other family members give a picture of Charley's activities.
The story continues:
"Charley -- Charles Sydney Foulks -- had been too old, at 43, for the war between the States. His brothers, James Morgan and Albert Gallatin had not been, so they were on the battlefields. His brother Daniel was just completing training as a physician, a skill more valuable than soldiering...or farming. That's why Charley, oldest son of Columbiana County scion Charles Morgan Foulks, was again packing his gear for a long journey. His father, now 66, could still 'ride the river' making various entrepreneurial 'deals' -- but he had only one son at home to follow up on them."Like the oil well. No one quite remembered when Charles Morgan -- Morg, as friends called him -- had gained an interest in it, but it had become a gusher for its era. Morg wrote his sister Minerva, in 1862, that the well was 600 feet deep and flowing 'of itself' 15 to 18 barrels of 'pure oil' a day. He had gone to see it for himself. But the flow subsided, until the amount of oil gained was not worth cost of handling it...especially when the men necessary for such an enterprise were all off to war."Those two paragraphs come from a wide variety of sources -- newspaper stories about Morg, printed obits, letters, and of course my own genealogical records.
The same sources helped me piece together this post-war update:
"Willingly, Charley handled family responsibilities -- including the work and travel that went with them. Morg had to have somebody to help, and he was the eldest son. Charley was the one to worry about the land in Meigs County, as well as Gallia, Vinton and Richland Counties, as his father helped provide the entrepreneurial spirit of turning frontiers into civilized communities. He knew things would change when the war ended."But they didn't. James Morgan was medically discharged; the results of dysentery fever sending him to the county's insane asylum. Daniel - long ago nicknamed 'Doc' - followed his ambitions to become a physician. (Curiously, Daniel was paid a $50 bounty to retrieve James after an escape from the county home. James later escaped again, never to be heard from afterward.) Albert had been away from farm life during his Civil War service, and did not want to return to it -- he chose to practice law, as well as become a merchant, in Calcutta."The story goes on, in this fashion, at considerable length. Within it, I give all the immediate family members of that generation images that are based on fact, and I turn them into individuals that my current family can visualize. Eventually, I posit that Charley moved from Ohio to Indiana because his wife's parents had already made such a move, and Harriett Johnson Foulks simply wanted to be closer to Mom and Dad.
Okay, so Charley was hen-pecked. And that's why I was born in Indiana instead of Ohio.
I'll not, in any way, accept criticism that I have harmed Charley with such a phony biography. I have made him into a real person for members of my family, rather than just a name printed on a chart. I think Charley would like that, and I'm sure his schoolteacher father would. Charles Morgan Foulks -- 'Morg' -- once taught in the same schoolhouse as William Holmes McGuffey of McGuffey Reader fame. (But that's another story I haven't gotten to.)
I've handled others, similarly. When I learned that an ancestor had been a personal surveyor for George Washington, it was a fact worth bragging about...for a couple of days. I'm inclined to believe my grade-school grandsons remembered it for at least a day, before becoming immersed in Brett Favre's pass completion statistics of last week. Had I learned of a family link to Mr. Favre, I'm sure the bragging would continue today.
But I dug deeper, a search made easier by the Library of Congress' release earlier this year of Washington's archived letters. I learned that ancestor Charles Morgan had also been a property manager for Washington, trying to resuscitate the first President's Ohio Valley holdings into profit -- something that apparently did not occur prior to Washington's death. That led me to reading of Washington's now well-recorded financial plight in his post-political days. He was a heavily-propertied landowner with a terrible cash flow, a fact we can all understand.
From all that research, I fabricated another story. It's far too lengthy to share with you, and it has some slippery "facts," as well as more than a little bit of fiction. Plausible, yes -- with corroboration, no way. The facts I can uncover are there -- I just made them relate to each other in an interesting fashion. Only George and Charles can knowledgeably argue with me.
I do know my four children and six grandchildren have read my stories, and I do believe the tales will be remembered lifelong. I'm also comfortable that the key facts of family relationships -- and the sheer facts of such -- are now relevant in a way no family tree chart could ever provide.
I have used the same technique repeatedly. I pick a significant point-in-time or era of my ancestor's life and then dwell deeply upon what they were doing then. Anyone can do that. Where was Great Great Uncle Joe on D-Day? Did ggggrandfather William hear, in person, the Gettysburg Address? Did ggg Aunt Minerva watch the Erie Canal being built? My late step-father was a tank driver in the WW II Battle of Anzio, a story I intend to tackle in the months ahead.
We all have ancestors who were participants in history, if only as observers.
Yep, I know the hardcore genealogists will cringe, and possibly condemn me for such an approach. For them, I can only justify my "family storifying" as an ends justifying its means -- my family became more interested in my research, and have since clamored for additional such stories. I also cite the time-hallowed Midnight Ride of Paul Revere as being something less than fully accurate, but quite definitive in its attraction of reader-interest and remembrance. Looking at a painting of George Washington's Crossing of the Delaware seldom makes one wonder how long the artist had to make the troops pose, as he brushed. Of course, we know there was no such pose...but the image is enduring.
The point being, much of our own knowledge of our backgrounds and past is already based on editorial and artistic interpretations of the facts of the day. It would be great if we could somehow capture the facts of the past to assemble them into an order that would be understandable today. But some facts are lost forever, and only our own interpretations of related information can give relevancy to our family histories.
Okay, so I'm a writer, and you're not. You can't do that kind of thing. Hogwash.
You tell stories every day. We all do. At the watercooler. Over the back fence. Chatting with a neighbor at the mailbox. Listen to yourself -- you do tell stories. And that's all I'm suggesting. You have already pondered Luke's baffling disappearance from family records, and you already have some theories as to "why." You don't have to turn Luke into an axe-killer to generate a story about his running away from home that is based on fact. Certainly, you say it is fictionalized -- television and Hollywood do that every day.
If you can't get it written any other way, pick up the recorder and set it down in front of someone you want to tell the story to. Start talking. Afterward, by yourself, transcribe what you said. It is amazingly easy. Try it.
I hereby give you editorial license to relate your ancestors to today by making their lives relative to today's relatives. Now you have the license. No renewals are necessary.
Just use it with care.