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| Grandma Jean as a baby |
My maternal grandmother, Jean, was
born in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles in the year of 1926. After her first marriage in 1947, she moved around a lot, because my grandfather was a teacher, and they had to go where the work was. Which explains how her son, Michael, was born in Eugene, Oregon, but a year later my mom was born in Berkeley, California. By the time I was 2 years old, "Grandma Jean" had remarried and was moving around a lot again, due to her new husband working in Construction.
She would travel to visit me during holidays and birthdays. It was a way for me to spend time with my mother as well, after my parents divorced and my father had custody.
My memories of my grandmother are fond ones.
In the summer around my mom and I's birthdays, we would visit this place
in Los Gatos, CA, called Vesona Park. It had a lake, a river that ran through
the park, a giant playground, and while we were eating our picnic I could
feed the geese. There was also a miniature train that traveled through part of
the park. It was always a great place to meet up.
During Christmas, if we
didn't travel to her house for a visit, she would swoop into town in her faux
wood paneled Station Wagon, with black garbage bags filled to the brim with
presents. She believed that quantity was always better than quality. I think
she just liked to wrap presents. So what you unwrapped was always a mystery, I
mean seriously some really random things, but she did make sure that at least
one or two of the gifts were from your wish list. My list was always simple, coloring
pens and paper. A brand new set of colored ink pens in every color and hue was
the BEST thing in the world to me. One year she agreed to pay for my piano lessons as a birthday gift. That had a profound affect on me, for I was able to learn to read sheet music, sing along to songs I could play, and it set me up great for my later years in Choir and being a singer/songwriter. She gave me my first camera, an automatic. The kind of camera that was easy for a novice, and all you had to do was make sure you put the film cartridge in correctly. It did the rest. Had it not been for her taking pictures of me during our visits, I might not have anything to remember of my childhood. Every couple years after that, I would get the next upgrade in automatic camera, and unofficially became my family's photographer.
She also gave me my first complete sewing kit,
cross-stitch patterns, and crochet needles and yarn. It was always fun to
figure out how to use them and to see what I could make, but the usual default
was Barbie clothing. She was an avid clothes maker herself, she made all her own clothes, but she gave up
making me clothes when I became a "tween". Thank goodness for no more
polyester bell bottom pants. Thick Polyester seemed to be the perfect fabric to her, perhaps because it hung nicely and didn't need ironing? I am not quite sure.
I remember I was 10 when I took an airplane all by
myself to spend my first summer with her alone. She had a swimming pool, AND
she was living in San Diego. There was always some place for us to go during
the day. The ocean was warm, and the beaches were inviting. We could go to the Zoo, the Wild Animal Park, or to Sea World. In the evenings we would drink diet RC Cola, eat Cheese-Its and spend
hours playing Scrabble or Gin Rummy. She loved everything Hawaii related, so I learned to play on her Ukulele. She said San Diego reminded her of Hawaii. I loved it there so much I went to college at San Diego State University as a Comparative Literature major, and my first job was working the summer at Sea World next to the Dolphin Show.
When we had down time, during our visits, she would share her
office sanctuary with me, which was half sewing room and half genealogical library. I was regaled with the wonderful adventures of our ancestors who came from exotic places, made perilous voyages across a big
ocean, and then lived harsh lives as America's earliest pioneers. Mostly I was
interested in the "exotic places" they came from, because there were
Castles, and possibly leprechauns. I was young, but the writing bug was starting to creep in on me.
This summer visit became
a ritual all the way through my teenage years (the mid 80's). Each summer, I would read at least a dozen books, mostly of the murder
mystery variety. I loved Agatha Christie, Nancy Drew, and Stephen King. I
had also discovered The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. If we didn't
stay in San Diego we would road trip up through Yosemite, where she would tell
me about her teen years as a camp counselor, which sounded exactly like the set up for Dirty Dancing, and then we would settle in at Lake Tahoe for a
week of fun and reading. That faux wood paneled Station
Wagon only played 8-track tapes, by the way. Her favorites were Wayne Newton,
Barbara Streisand, Big Band music of the World War II era, and groups like the
Andrews' Sisters. The journey from San Diego to Lake Tahoe, with only that to
listen to, made for a long ride. But of course, I ended up learning each song and sang along with enthusiasm.
As I grew older, and she
felt I was responsible enough to care for them, she began to send me binders
full of her genealogical findings. She wrote narratives about the families based on
her research, to make it easier to understand, and filled out each family tree by hand on large scrolls. All her research was done by
going to libraries, traveling to Mormon Churches that had genealogical data,
and writing (via snail mail) to multiple State and County Departments in
regards to Census Data, Birth Certificates, Death Certificates, Probates,
Property Sales and Land Transfers; anything historically relevant to help her meander her way around the ever looming questions and perpetual dead ends. It was decades worth of work.
An outsider might look in
and wonder why does a woman spend all her time doing this? What does she have
to gain? Well, her husband worked, and aside from the occasional secretarial
work she did to assist him, she needed a hobby. She loved to garden, that was an ongoing pass time of hers, and she always needed to live where there was sunshine most the year. I didn't know this at the time, but she suffered from
depression, and she did say once that she had
to take a "happy" pill each day. I get it now, because I too suffer
from Seasonal Affective Disorder. I didn't have to wonder about her inspiration though,
I saw the wonderful places her imagination could wander to as each clue led to
the unraveling of a family mystery. It was detective work. It was addictive. It was fulfilling.
The further and further she would go back
in time, the more fascinating the stories became, and the fact that these
characters were our family, well that made it even cooler! It made me feel I belonged to something
larger than just my mother and father, and all the dysfunctional relationships circling around me. Time with her also offered me a safe warm
blanket of stability; for I knew she was always there for me.
When I grew older, had
children of my own, and moved around, she understood. It saddened her that we
didn't have that time together anymore, but through genealogy she continued
to send me more research and more stories for us to share - always with the
thought, that someday I would continue where she left off. I had known for a long while that I wanted to take these narratives and use them as inspiration to write a novel of some sort. She thought that was a great idea.
In April of 2010 she passed
away of Congenital Heart Failure. In her office sanctuary a large box had been set aside with my name on it. In it was even more research, but it turns out this was her first husband's family information on behalf of my mother. I inherited this
quest as well.
A couple years later, I finally sat down and started trying to figure out how to digitize
all this family information for posterity. My first thought: where do I even begin? So I started with her.
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| http://trees.ancestry.com/tree/53599200/family |