Tuesday, April 14, 2009
cemetery-traipsing buddies
One October--maybe the autumn before Garrett was born--Kimberly and I went cemetery traipsing in the cornfields and byways of Eastern North Carolina. We found Silas Crisp--he who was gone but not forgotten. We found Henrietta--Henrietta, wife of M. M. Crisp . . . No maiden name. . . Kimberly's brick wall, a wall she was soon to conquer, brick by brick, using her genealogist tools.
Remember that paper towel? Well, if you take another look, you will see that it listed Henrietta’s father as ‘Charlie.’ And my great-grandmother, Mammy Pattie, daughter of Henrietta? Her middle name was ‘Lucy.’ Not yet conclusive evidence that my Henrietta was the daughter of Charley & Lucy MEARES (I need to do additional research), but I know in my heart it is true. Henrietta has finally come back to tell her story.
We've traipsed other cemeteries too.
Johnstown's Grandview cemetery.
Sacred ground at Shanksville.
Memorials to those who lie under Lake Murray.
And, two Christmases ago, in the rain, the Summer Family Cemetery where the founder of the community where I work is buried.
Cemetery-traipsing buddies we are indeed, my daughter and I :-)
a genealogist's roots . . .
in Kimberly's own words . . .
My personal brick wall began with a paper towel – one of the brown industrial types often found in public restrooms. It was 1969, the year I was born, and my mother and great-grandmother were sitting by my grandfather’s bedside in a hospital room, when my mother felt the need to ask about her family roots. In my mother’s own words, “All that had never seemed quite so important before on Daddy’s side since, after all, his people were all on this side of the Atlantic.” But with her father lying in a hospital bed losing his desperate battle with cancer, the need suddenly became very real. My great-grandmother, Pattie Crisp Owens, known to her grandchildren as Mammy Pattie, shared with my mother the precious little she knew about her family that day.
With nothing handy to write on, my mother recorded the names given to her by Mammy Pattie on that brown paper towel – a towel that again made an appearance 11 years later when I came home and announced I had a family tree project to do for school. The search for Henrietta MARIN began that day . . .
With nothing handy to write on, my mother recorded the names given to her by Mammy Pattie on that brown paper towel – a towel that again made an appearance 11 years later when I came home and announced I had a family tree project to do for school. The search for Henrietta MARIN began that day . . .
Monday, April 13, 2009
letting her go . . .
It seldom snows in December in South Carolina--or in the first days of January, for that matter. But, that first Christmas home from Carnegie-Mellon, something in the skies above our home wanted to hold Kimberly here. We were snowdrifted, icebound--but she had a plane to catch and I had my new and blue Bonneville to slipslide our way to the nearby airport in and . . . Wonder if that something in the skies above our home knew that someone in Pittsburgh would steal our firstborn away from home for keeps . . .
Kimberly comes home to us--Albrecht, Kelsey, Garrett, and Kira Rose in tow--every Christmas season, even now.
If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours . . . ." -- Kahlil Gibran
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Christmas at Mama's: 1976
For Jamie and Michelle, this would be their one Christmas Day at Mama's house--that last winter we lived in the Virginia mountains outside Charlottesville. But for Kimberly, who spent her first two Christmases here healing Mama's heart after Granddaddy Owens died, this Christmas was about coming home . . . 
Like the angel on her white Christmas stocking, Kimberly was our hope on the darkest of days, in the darkest of times . . .
Above the mantle in this picture hung a portrait of her grandfather. There are no pictures of Kimberly with Granddaddy Owens--except the one in my memory.
It's a July afternoon in 1969. Daddy's sitting on one of those folding lawn chairs on the brick patio just outside the room pictured here, holding his first grandchild in his lap . . . I so want to snap that picture, for her, but I know he would want, in her created memory, to be the man in that portrait above the mantle. So I put the camera, and the wish, away--but never, ever, the memory of that July afternoon in 1969.
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