They were the keepers of our family’s collective
history.
And no one kept that history quite like Frannie, my mother’s
mothers’ cousin. In a sense, she was a little
like me – a much younger cousin who was actually the age of her cousins’
children. I wonder now if she ever got
lumped in with great-granchildren like my brother and I did.
I’m not exactly sure when I first met Frannie but I do know
that she was the first genie that I ever met.
And I don’t mean the Barbara Eden kind of genie. I mean the genie who understands the
difference between researching family history versus just searching for a name
on the Internet – she was a genealogist.
It seemed as if she had tracked down practically every branch of our
family tree and she kept all that information in massive binders of loose-leaf
paper on which her lengthy notes were hand written. She was a genealogist at a time when
searching for family history wasn’t done with a click of a button but instead
required hundreds of hours combing through dusty tomes or sitting at microfilm
readers looking for that one name to buried on the page.
Her work was all very admirable but that’s not the reason
why I liked Frannie. I liked her because
she was the first person to make my family’s history come alive. My mom and I went to visit her and her
husband, Harry, and I remember being in her kitchen when she told me an amazing
story about my grandmother being an air raid warden in World War II. Her memories were a window to a past that has
largely been forgotten.
The sad part is that past has been forgotten because there
aren’t many around to tell us about it. My
mother’s family is not a long-lived one.
Her father died at 49. 2 of her
siblings died before they were 60. Her
oldest brother died at 62. By the end of
1990, my mother had lost that brother, her mother, and one sister within three
years of each other. A lot of our family
history was lost with them – some missing parts only filled in by a great-aunt
here or a cousin-once-removed there.
People like Frannie.
The past continues to slip away.
People like Frannie continue to slip away.
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Earlier this year, after conversations with some cousins, I
decided to set up a website dedicated to our family history - to capture what we are slowly losing as the years go by. It’s a
place where we can share our family records – I am an archivist after all, our
photographs, and our stories. It’s where
we can recall our shared history and keep our memories from fading too far into the past. It’s a way to connect with our past and
reconnect with one another.
I have been blown away by the response. All the work paid off when one of my cousin’s
daughters emailed me and said “Our family had a bar?! I never knew that.” That was a good night. I’m also having tons of fun doing it – it’s all
the things that I love – writing, history, records, making the past come alive.
Even though the past will continue to slip away, I am hopeful that our stories and our memories will not.I think Frannie would like that.
