It’s not a comfortable time for our country right now. For some reason, perhaps due to our enforced confinement, my husband and I started remembering family stories—our own family histories, good, bad, indifferent. Stories in which personalities peek through the misty past.
I’d love for you to share such stories, those that you like to tell but may not have an audience for, especially if you have exhausted the patience of children and grandchildren. To me these stories bring the past alive. Here are two of mine:
First story:
My great-grandfather’s parents came from Ireland in 1837 and farmed in Ohio. (I always praise the potato because without it they [and thus I] would probably not have been born, and they were lucky to miss the horrible famine of 1847). Their son John was born in 1847 in Ohio. Like many countrymen, the family moved west around 1860. They reached St. Louis, where they were to wait for a boat to take them up the Mississippi to Wisconsin. The family briefly dispersed, with plans to meet at the port. But John, then aged 14, never arrived.
Some years later he was living in St. Louis. He had changed his name to John W. Donnell, become a Unitarian, and married a young woman (Maria Tilden) from Roxbury, Massachusetts, who had a small dowry. All these steps, of course, were designed to make him acceptable in an era that disparaged the Irish. Using his wife’s dowry, he tried out some businesses. I don’t think he had much success but he managed to get his name into the 1906 Book of St. Louisans (with his parents’ birthplace rather vague), not to mention membership in the Missouri Historical Society.
As you might have gleaned, John W. Donnell was a social climber. A cousin of mine (his granddaughter) went to college on the remnant of the Tilden dowry. She told me about receiving postcards with John W. Donnell’s photograph on the front (I guess you could have your personal postcard made back then). He seemed to travel a lot on business while his wives (first, Maria, then after she died, her cousin Fanny) quietly stayed at home.
He was an egotist, but his descendants included some fine people, such as my mother.
Second story:
In World War II, my father was drafted into the Army, even though he had a baby daughter, my sister. He had a degree in civil engineering from Washington University (St. Louis), and his team’s job was to prevent malaria on the Burma Road, which connected Burma (Myanmar) with China. (Further research suggests that it was actually the Ledo Road, which replaced the Burma Road after the Japanese took control in 1942). They fought malaria by draining swamps.
Mail from the States had to be screened and microfilmed before being sent abroad. (No phone calls!) In November 1944, my father received a letter from my mother referring to “the funeral.” He assumed that his second child had been born and died. Some days later he got another microfilm letter indicating that his daughter had been born and would be named Jane. But his father-in-law, a genial and much-loved man, had died suddenly of a heart attack five days after my birth. His was the funeral. He died at age 56.
The family story, such as it was, was always about the letter mix-up. But it also lingered as a sad footnote to my birth, and I often wished I could have met “Walter B.”
So, simple stories. But they capture elements of our lives and the way we think of ourselves. I hope you will share some with me.
The photo on the left is of Walter B. Donnell, my grandfather. On the right is John W. Donnell, my great-grandfather.