My mother liked to tell stories about her mother, who was a flapper in the 1920s. Apparently, my grandmother worked in the fledgling film industry and for extra money made bathtub gin, which she hid in the back of her large Atwater Kent radio and sold to off-duty cops. She wore a kimono in the mornings, had a canary she called “Dickie Bird,” and went to parties at the Falcon’s Lair and had Ben Turpin to dinner. And she once got so ticked off at my grandfather’s too-frequent invites to his friends for poker parties that she made them some chocolate cookies spiked with Ex-lax.
Mother would show me pictures of her mother and my favorite was the one of my grandmother as a girl of about eight, sitting in a rocking chair on a wooden porch wearing a dark dress and stockings and the high-button shoes typical of the very early 1900s. At her feet, an interested Boston Terrier cocked his head as he looked at the camera. This was the only picture my mother had of her mother as a child and I found it significant that my grandmother was eight years old in the picture—the same age my mother was when her mother committed suicide.
I’ve thought of that photograph often and in recent years, very often, because we no longer have it. Except for pictures taken by my older sisters, there are no photographs of any of my mother’s family in our hands. My mother lost them all along with the family bible, which had generations of names, births, marriages, and deaths in it. I mourn the loss of that information almost more than the photographs, and nearly as much as the people in my life who have died.
I recall Mother having a keen interest in her ancestry. She researched her family thoroughly using the family bible and following up conversational clues. She even made pilgrimages to the LDS library in Utah, where much genealogical information is to be found and always came back excited. I remember bits and pieces of what she said, but not details—as a child, I didn’t understand it, and when I was a teenager I was only interested in teenager things: me and my friends.
Most people find family history pretty boring until they hit their late twenties or early thirties. By then, you pretty much think you know who you are and get curious about where you come from. This is especially true if you’ve started a family. Those of my nieces and nephews who have reached this age have started contacting me lately because, when they ask their moms about the family history, my sisters refer them to me. I send them email invitations to our family tree on ancestry.com and ask them to contribute to their own branches.
But a few of the branches remain empty. Despite scouring census records and voting records and other records, whole sections end at the names of great-great grandparents. My mother’s family spent a few generations in a small town in Missouri that had a fire around the turn of the century, which destroyed all of the birth, marriage, and death records. Without the information from the family bible, there is nowhere else to look. If I had the photos, I might be able to find some clues in them that could provide some alternate information.
For example, I remember a picture of my great-grandfather posing with other volunteer firemen around their new steam-powered pump, the white horses pulling it standing calmly while the picture was taken and the black and white blur of a Dalmatian firedog who found something more interesting to do than sit still. With engine company identifiers and store signs in the background, I might have been able to contact local historical societies in Jasper County and find out something about my great-grandfather and what he did before the family moved to California in 1910. But the photograph exists only in my memory now.
