BLOG: Private eye and family history investigator extraordinaire
I spent Easter at my grandparents’ house, and while I know that sounds like the most boring weekend ever, I actually discovered a lot about my family history and myself.
For starters, my grandma had been a writer. My family has known my journalistic aspirations for years, so you think this would have been talked about before. Weirdly, over the weekend, I found out that my grandma had worked for her own high school newspaper in Wolf, Oklahoma. She had interviewed people over the phone, typed up her stories on a typewriter, and mailed them to her editor.
That’s what I do, and it blows my mind that nobody bothered to tell me it was in my blood from the beginning. That’s when I stumbled upon more of my grandma’s writing — she had actually written a story about her adventures in coming to babysit me when I was a toddler. It was adorable, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t snooped through her things before.
After some more investigating, I came across photos of my dad in his youth, including photos of his high school graduation where he was sporting one of the worst black eyes I’ve ever seen. This seemed like something I should have known, and I’m still confused as to why nobody ever thought to tell me this story.
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Granted, I’m a storyteller. It’s part of why I like writing. That side of the family, however, just isn’t into their history as I am. When I confronted my dad about this, he told me simply that he found it all rather boring, so he never bothered to talk about it. I, on the other hand, find it fascinating to draw connections to the past.
For example, my grandparents had two baby boys who died as infants. I had known about one named Scott, but not the other. What if those two infant boys had remained healthy and grown into adulthood? Maybe one of them would have moved to Colorado, or Hawaii, and maybe my dad would have followed suit. Maybe my mom would have never met my father in Oklahoma during spring break, and therefore, maybe I wouldn’t exist.
Maybe these two babies died so that I could live.
It’s thoughts like this that make family history so interesting to me. I’ve always looked at birth dates and compared them to their parents’ wedding day, just in case it was a shotgun wedding that got swept under the rug. Pictures also fascinate me because people are right in saying that they’re worth 1,000 words.
In the end, I learned a lot about my family and about myself over Easter weekend. I got to hear a blow-by-blow account of the cat’s behavior every day (she likes to play with ice chips!) and my clothes still have that old people smell on them, but it was worth it.
