family tree

I think everyone is interested in where they came from, but I've been much more in the years since we had kids.  Through the diligent work of various family members in researching, and the efforts of my mom in putting that research together in one place, I've learned a lot about different branches of my family tree that I did not know before.

One branch that I knew very little about bothered me quite a bit because it is the branch that my surname comes from.  I have always known my paternal grandfather father's name, but didn't know anything about him.  Furthermore, my dad only had limited contact with that side of the family when he was a kid, and so it felt like the source of my name ended with that one individual that I knew nothing about.

It's amazing how learning one or two small details about a person can fill in a lot of facts that you don't already know.  I recently discovered further information about this great-grandfather that makes his life seem both tragic and fascinating, but the details are minimal.

First, I found out that my great-grandfather was his father's fifteenth child to his third wife.  Both of his parents died before he was a teenager, so he was raised by a sister.  His father had been a devout Quaker, but I don't know if the family's faith or just the era in which they lived more influenced why he kept remarrying after his wives died and having more kids.

My understanding is that my great-grandfather was irreligious for most or all of his life--a seeming oddity in southwestern Missouri in the early 1900s--and I wonder if he blamed his father's faith for being without parents at a reasonably early age.  While most kids were expected to take on adult responsibilities at an earlier age in those days, I have to wonder how that affected him.  He would have had to grow up fast.

Second, I found out that my great-grandmother (my paternal grandfather's mother) died eighteen years prior to my great-grandfather.  This calls to mind something that my mind does every time I'm at a cemetery.  I look at the gaps between when spouses died and I imagine what their lives were like when they were together, then what sort of life the surviving spouse had afterward.  I know it's morbid, but I can't not do it.

I asked my dad what he knew about his grandfather's life during those eighteen years, and he said he lived alone in a very small house near the Missouri/Oklahoma border with a dog.  I asked if he were a reader, and my dad didn't recall that he was.  What does a person do for eighteen years without someone else around?  Nowadays, I can imagine being able to get on by yourself with TV, the Internet, etc.  However, I cannot imagine a life of that sort of solitude and minimal outside stimuli.

So, with a few additional data points that I have learned in the last few months I have generated quite a vision of how one of my ancestors lived.  It's a sad vision, but it's far more significant than a name on a line in a tree.