Sunday morning meditation

[The cats want to play. I want to type. Who wins?]

Family stories say my great-grandmother died in her fifties from an ailment like rheumatism or rheumatoid arthritis. Is that true?

The facts about history that we’re missing include medical records and work records that medical practices and businesses have no obligation to share with the public.

Understandably, a medical ailment may have been perceived as a weakness or liability to the living person. What about to descendants?

Also, wouldn’t we like to know how a person performed in the workplace, positive and negative?

No one left alive can tell me about my father’s ancestors.

Dad was an only child, born to a woman who was the only one to provide a grandchild for her parents (her brother and his wife had no children, supposedly because my great-uncle didn’t want to bring a child into the world before/during/after the atrocities of WWII).

I found in the bedroom suite I inherited from my father who inherited it from his mother a few documents from the church that my great-grandparents attended — Sunday school lessons, church bulletins (what I think of as Sunday morning meeting agendas), and announcements.

In those documents were mentioned the achievements of my great-grandfather, including the decade landmark years of attendance, a special set of Sunday school lessons my great-grandfather had put together for the Men’s Bible Study class, and fundraising campaign milestones.

No mention of my great-grandmother except as my great-grandfather’s wife who was at home in need of prayers as an invalid.

Did my grandmother inherit the writeup about her father (my great-grandfather) whilst my great-uncle was given the writeup about their mother (my great-grandmother)?

I know my great-uncle inherited the bulk of the “estate” of his father, such as it was, very small and mostly handmade, his father (my great-grandfather) being a lower middle income railroad tinsmith who had to build a lot of what he and his family needed.

Sadly, after my great-uncle died, my great-aunt designated that the bulk of their estate, including family heirlooms made by my great-grandfather, should go to a school for wayward children after she died, leaving only monetary gifts to us: $1500 each for my parents, my sister and me, big sums at the time (paid for a year-plus of studies at the University of Tennessee in the 1970s).

My father luckily visited his great-uncle’s home the day that the school for wayward children was hauling off the contents of my great-aunt’s house.

He was able to rescue a few household goods not specifically listed, including the small handmade items I shared earlier in this blog. All but a few of the handmade furniture and its contents were already gone or discarded. He was “allowed” to sort through a pile of “junk” that included two boxes of tools my great-grandfather had purchased but had developed a sheen of rust. I have those in my garage and work shed, using them occasionally because they’re stronger and sturdier than tools I can buy locally (note to self: photodocument these for future blog post and share as family records for sister, niece, and nephew).

Any chance I had of knowing anything about my great-grandmother disappeared that day, except online birth, marriage, death and census data, if available.

My great-uncle, who served as a clerk during WWII (supposedly part of the unit responsible for the logistical movement and supply of airplanes for the U.S. Navy’s domestic fleet (separate from direct use in oversea battles)), was a postal clerk after WWII, rising to postmaster of the local post office.

My great-aunt was a secretary for a private medical practice and a part-time medical transcriptionist after she retired (I remember them stating that my great-uncle’s postal pension wasn’t enough to pay the household bills so she had to keep working; don’t know how much VA benefits or Medicare covered my great-uncle’s long, slow decline due to emphysema).

They lived quiet, humble lives as DINKs before DINKs were cool.

Their hobbies included finding and restoring old antiques they picked up at garage sales, thrift stores and estate sales, turning a small profit such that they saved up and bought a “fancy” Stearns and Foster mattress set, of which they were quite proud. They felt like they had made it rich as a middle income couple and proudly showed off the mattress and boxsprings, which were set in a king-sized bed antique frame raised off the floor a couple of feet (my great-aunt had to use a two-step stool to get into bed; my great uncle was 6’8” and could step directly onto the bed).

My sister has a bedside chamber pot stand that belonged to my great-grandfather which was rescued by my father the day the school for wayward children swept through and “stole” my father’s inheritance.

My father also rescued this small wooden stool he remembered my great-grandfather sat on while working his basement metal forge. It was covered in soot and burn marks so my father used the furniture restoration skills his uncle (my great-uncle the postmaster) taught him, the surface sanded down, rusty nail holes filled, and the stool coated with a satin finish, proudly giving it to me before he died.

At that time, knowing a little bit about my great-grandfather, I asked my father about my great-grandmother after seeing my great-grandparents’ 1910 wedding day photo on a wall in my parents’ house.

He said she was a godly woman, strong yet quiet, who died while Dad was young (Dad was approximately 16 years old when his grandmother died, but she had been sick a long time so I imagine her active years ended when Dad was young and that’s what he remembered when he told me about her being “strong yet quiet”; could also be why there was brief mention of her in the church documents — she hadn’t been active in the church for a while?).

My great-grandmother convinced my grandmother to go to college, who graduated from Carson Newman with a Bachelor of Arts degree in education in 1934, married for the first time that year, birthed my father the next year, divorced her first husband a few years later, and remarried in 1942.

She taught school briefly before settling down as a stay-at-home wife (known as a smart but eccentric person, my grandmother, a devout Southern Baptist, was put on Librium and had electroshock treatment for “nervousness and thinking too much” in the 1950s, whatever that means, possibly manic-depression/bipolar disorder (she also had electroshock treatments in the 1990s for severe depression)), moving from military location to military location with her second husband (a career Navy man stationed around the world), leaving her son (my father) to be raised by his grandparents (my great-grandparents).

My father, in turn, considered by every contemporary in the family to be the smartest person in our family (he had the knack of learning and storing lots of contradictory information in his thoughts — left/right, liberal/conservative, religious/atheist, mythological/scientific, fascist/democratic, communist/capitalist — and, despite being a strong conservative himself, could carry on an intellectual discussion of opposing theories without judging/condemning views that opposed his (at least until the last years of his life)), graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration in the 1950s after returning from draft service in the U.S. Army during the Cold War (I gather from photos that after his Army service, my father relished the life of a college frat boy rather than a serious student, choosing an “easy” business degree rather than an engineering or mathematics bachelor’s degree), and earned a master’s degree in industrial engineering in the 1960s.

Thus, if nothing concrete in the form of newspaper clippings or church documents exists, I have a legacy of my great-grandmother in good moral/ethical practices (i.e., godliness) and an emphasis on formal education.

In a search of the U.S. Census data, it appears my great-grandmother was living at home with her parents, working as a “typewriter” at a “wholesale hardware” store in 1910 at the age of 23 (she married my great-grandfather later that year), her mother not working and her father a salesman for a drug store (he was a packer of drugs in 1900 census). An online copy of her death certificate showed she died at age 64 of a cerebral thrombosis (hemorrhage) due to hypertension. No mention of rheumatism. No idea how good of a typewriter she was, either.

For my family, history is hit or miss. I don’t know what I’m missing but I’ll take what I can find and pass it on to living family members and interested readers.