By:
The Dude on the Right
This past week or so something came back up in my life that I would really like
to research, really would like to find out the answers to, and would really like
to figure out a great way to document things, both the good and the bad, but
sadly the time to find these things are slipping away. It’s my Dude
genealogy.
I
got into it a bunch of years back, but it started again over the 4th of July
weekend, when I was starting to clean the Dude-Pad, and I found a place to hang
some older paintings of some of my elders that would actually sort of work in
the decorative scheme of my Dude-Pad. I was pretty sure the one picture
was of my Grandma, but didn’t really know who the other dude was. So I
e-mailed my mother, and for the photo to the right I was able to confirm that
the painting of the girl was my Grandma, at age 16, and that the painting of the
dude is my Great Uncle Edward. From my Mom’s memory, he died in World War
I, was declared missing, then my Great-Great Grandma went to France to see what
is his grave. I have never known the man, but we are related, and thanks
to my Mom, I have a story to tell about him, the man in the painting. And
that’s the thing we seem to miss about our ancestors, accurate stories to tell.
The sort of bummer side of this is that my Grandma always had stories to tell,
and I was a lot younger at the time, so most of them are in fragments. I
remember her stories about her coming over on a boat, and the boat had trouble
getting here, and still remember that she made the best toast, with the pat of
butter that didn’t melt so when you got to the middle of the toast you got
squished bread with a big pat of butter. My Grandma aside, in the grand
scheme of things, my mother had a plan to record our history, especially since
this was the donning of the age of cassette tapes: Visit Grandma and let
her record her stories. But my Grandma was not really one for technology,
didn’t want to "tell her stories to a tape recorder," and for most of the times,
unless those memories pop up for whatever reason, most of her stories are lost.
As I’m writing this blog, two of her stories pop back into my head, and they are
two of my favorites, never to be forgotten, but my dilemma in this blog is how
to start to record these things I find, or remember, and try to find the best
way to document them. And now my self-diagnosed OCD kicks in because as
much as we don’t want to admit it, all of our families are fascinating, from the
good to the bad, and in this day and age, when we can easily record our history,
we still forget to.
71ish
years ago a woman named Miss Burrell put a simple quote in an autograph book of
my Aunt’s. Back then, girls kept autograph books, and my Aunt had a book,
which I now have. The quote was this: Happiness is an excellent
remedy and keeps people in better health than any other medicine. I don’t
know where Miss Burrell got this quote, or whether she made it up on her own,
but it’s a quote that still fits with life today. The autograph book I
have isn’t that big, but it is filled with lots of other quotes, sayings,
things, that shouldn’t be lost. And as I hold it, it is at least 71ish
years old.
And as my OCD continues to kick in, the oldest thing that I know I
have is a silver dollar coin from 1878. It’s not worth much money because
most of all of it is worn, but the date is there, a mere 13 years after Abraham
Lincoln was assassinated. My Grandma on my Mom’s side was born a mere 20
years after that coin. And I’m not even going to get into my Dad’s side
right now because otherwise this blog will get really too long.
I guess I got sort of melancholy over the last weekend, but realized again
that all of our lives are fascinating, and should be shared, to at least our
families, and it shouldn’t just be the good, but it should also be the bad, so
that we can, and our siblings can, know where we come from, and learn. I
guess I’m such a dork sometimes.
That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!