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julietsierra -> RE: what did your ancestors do? (6/23/2007 6:32:52 AM)
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Interestingly, for our family, my aunt did a geneology search a number of years before her death. What she found was that my ancestor was John Robinson, the pastor to the Puritans and the one who called for the vote to board the Mayflower and go to the "new world." He never did get to come to the colonies to see what his call had wrought, but his sons did.
Through the years, our family has had its share of Puritans, Calvinists, Methodists and Catholics. We've had members who have married within their religion, outside of their religion and one family member bought a Native American woman to be his bride. According to family records, they lived a long and fruitful (by their standards) life.
We've had abolitionists and people who fought on the Union side of the Civil War.
My grandfather (although we just call him my grandmother's first husband) was a tentative polygamist who brought home his new girlfriend to help my grandmother during the birth of her first child - my mother. My grandmother nearly killed the woman and then kicked her husband out the door, filed papers and became one of this area's first recognized divorces. She was also the first librarian at the Holt Public Library in Holt, Michigan. There's some talk that she was the one to begin the library but I'm never sure what's family conversation and what's truth in that regard.
The Puritan/Calvinist ideas of stoicism and decorum have followed this family throughout the years. At my grandfather's funeral (he was a volunteer fireman who lost his life in a grass fire) no one cried except my Uncle's wife. My grandmother leaned over, looked at my uncle and said "Joseph. Shut your wife up. We mourn in private."
My mother is a very pragmatic woman who rarely gets emotional - except when discussing how she feels about my father. And I am embarrassed to no end by my tears and will do nearly anything to avoid people seeing me that way.
On my father's side, it's said that he comes from a lineage that includes a Duke. However, what I've discovered in my searches is that the claim to noble lineage is kind of predominant in Polish families and since a few world wars have destroyed any paperwork that might have existed to prove or disprove such allegations, there's no way of knowing - but it's fun to contemplate anyway. My grandfather was part of the immigration movement of the 1900s and came in through Ellis Island. However, since he was very young, he never remembered any of that - even when Alzheimers stole everything but his past memories.
I know that my grandmother's family came from Serbia and that her uncle was chased throughout Europe by the Black Hands. He was eventually hunted down and killed but no one knows for sure where. Her father escaped with his wife and children to the United States to avoid that same thing happening to him. My grandmother was born here.
When my grandmother and grandfather met, their parents were not happy - on either side of the Polish/Serbian fence. They were 16 and 19 respectively when they eloped. They were married and desperately in love from the moment they met until the day my grandfather passed away - and he was the last of them to go. My grandfather tried coal mining when he was newly married but went down once and swore he'd never go down again. We still have some of the equipment of his short run at the mining industry. Instead he became a glass blower for a while.
When Detroit became an industrial giant, he packed my grandmother, all their belongings - including the bathtub - and moved to Detroit from a small town in Ohio. Detroit at that time was a city of neighborhoods and Hamtramck was the home of the Polish culture in this area. It was there my father was born. He was a part of the history of Detroit, being a musician, teacher and all around good guy.
Both of my parents were school teachers. Now, more than 20 years after they retired from their jobs, I continue to come across their former students everywhere I go, although truth be told, more of them remember my father than they do my mother even though they would have had them both as teachers. My parents have touched the world in ways they still doesn't know about. Even now, one of my co-workers was one of their students.
When my father and mother met, it was a Catholic meeting a daughter of the Masons and her mother was not very pleased at all. It took the person I always called my grandfather (my mother's step father) to say "Marge, they're not asking for your permission or blessing. They're just politely informing you that it's happening. Shut up."
Coincidentally, I used that same line on my father who'd heard it so many years ago when I told him that I was seeing the person who would eventually become my Master. This time, it was my mother who, in private, echoed what I said when she hit my father in the ribs and said "Ted, she's not asking you for permission or your blessing. She's just informing you."
Each and everyone of us has ancestors who have done great things. Those great things may be amazing, or they may be what most people think of as inconsequential, but all of them were participants in our personal and collective history.
And all of them have stories to tell.
If you have never thought about it before, I urge you to get recordings of those people who came before you telling you of their history. It's amazing stuff and most of all, it's YOUR history.
(and people say history is boring - I just don't get it.)
juliet
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