Family History

There are many things that prompt a family history project—a school assignment, a desire to see if you are related to anyone famous or infamous as the case may be, and simply wanting to know your family roots. Perhaps you want to know where your family first settled in the United States or maybe you want to be sure about the country your family originated from. Perhaps you simply want to identify the first one in a long line of folks similar to you.

My father began his quest in 1985 after the birth of Dear Son. My parents made the trek from Canton, Georgia to Virginia Beach, Virginia to see their newest grandchild and stayed a few days. While Papa Buddy, as his grandchildren call him, was thrilled to hold the newest member of our family he was distracted a bit by a local Virginia Beach attraction called The Francis Land House (pictured here).

I had already wondered if Francis Land could be an ancestor as I passed by the home weekly going here and there. We discussed how the family line of Francis Land would probably have been researched already all the way back to relations in England. If we could get our line back far enough perhaps we could find the link that would connect the two families.

Papa Buddy made sure he visited the property before heading home, and once back in Georgia he became more than interested in his family line. He made sure he let the docents at the Francis Land House know that he was a Land, and my mother stated he was treated really well while there. Today my father has a lovely picture of the home framed along with a nice handwritten note from the director of the property hanging in his home. Through his research we discovered that Charles Lindburgh was part of a Land family branch on his mother’s side, and we found this interesting person as well.

Today because of my father’s hardwork we know for certain who is who from my children back eight generations. I can say with certainty that I know the name of the sixth great-grandfather of my children dating to the birth of Isaac Land, Sr. in 1750. Fortunately a relative has posted the line including some of the other sibling lines as well. Unfortunately it was at the year 1750 that my father reached a brick wall in the paper trail which so often defeats a family researcher.

My earliest known relative, Isaac Land, Sr., is in the militia records and they indicate he fought during the fall of Charleston because in 1785 he collected his pension. His son was named Jeremiah and his wife, Catherine, was born in Fannin County, Georgia. I know that my family was in a group of many settlers that began to move from North Carolina over the mountains into Tennessee and later Georgia. The first relative that did this was Isaac Land, Jr. He’s buried in Pickens County, Georgia and I have been to his grave. He was minister of the gospel for sixty years. It is at this point that my part of the Land family finally settled in and around Cherokee County where my father lives today.

The question remained, however, who came before Isaac, Sr.?

Many family groups are bridging the paper gap in family lines by using DNA testing. When paper proof cannot be located DNA can at least provide information that one group is related to another. Will we ever find a missing link that joins our family group to the group for Francis Land? I don’t know, but I do know that through the process you do find out little details you wouldn’t have known earlier. This is the webpage announcing the details for a DNA project with several Land family lines, and this is the page that proclaims:

We now have results from eleven (11) previously unrelated participants that indicate that they are related to a common Land ancestor. These results show that James Land, NC, 1793; Joseph Land, VA, 1724; William Land, SC, 1795; Jacob Land,1809, SC; Isaac Land, NC, 1750 (my relative); Thomas James Land c. 1727-1734 VA; and Samuel Land, Delaware are all from the same family!

Now we just need to figure out how!

Occasionally as I do a new search under the family name I discover pictures of relatives others have posted. At this link I discovered a great uncle many times removed in the first picture. In the fifth set of pictures my great grandfather is featured with a great uncle and his son and grandson, and in the final photo I discovered a family grouping of my great grandparents and all of their children taken at the homeplace that used to be on my father’s property. My father has the same photo. My great-grandparents are sitting on the second row in the middle and along the bench with them are their children. My grandfather is on the left at the very end with my grandmother standing immediately behind her. Their daughter Rachel is next to her while the other daughter, Ruth is on the row with only four girls. She is the first one on the left. The note with this picture indicates it was taken in 1927, so it was two years before my father was born.

This post was actually prompted by Dr. Blaine Bettinger at The Genetic Genealogist who posted his own thoughts about the genetics of the blogging meme, The Thinking Blogger.

When I discovered Dr. Bettinger had linked to me I clicked over and read his post. As I read it I couldn’t help but think about my father’s family line. Once we go two steps away from my grandfather, our family, like many others, have no pictures, no letters, and no journals to indicate to us who these names on our family tree represent. These ancestors while they are very important to my family are merely inked names in dusty record books across time. We will never know what they actually looked like or sounded like. I know that certain members of my family fought in the Revolution, in the War of 1812, and in the Civil War. We have papers that track their movements, but I don’t know why they fought or how they felt about their service.

I was able to reach across the Internet last week and introduce myself to Dr. Bettinger as his blog meme great-grandmother many times over. Unfortunately my oldest ancestors cannot do that except by exisiting as a name on a list.

The optimist in me, however, would like to think that nine generations or so in the future as another member of the Land family may be searching for relatives they will find more than simply names and certificates in heavy books. They will be able to locate weblogs like this one, websites, and MySpace pages of relatives and discover much more behind a name with a simply click of a mouse.

Coincidence? I Think Not!

During the four years my mother spent in a nursing home my sister and I were not her only visitors. There was a core of lovely ladies who regularly came to spend a few minutes or they sent her cards and letters. They are all so very special to my sister and I…. now that Mom is gone.

One very nice lady in particular was from my Mom’s hometown and they had gone to school together. Later on in life they both found themselves living in the suburbs of Atlanta, but rarely communicated. Later, after my parents divorce they both discovered they lived in the same small town south of Atlanta. They spoke often on the phone and visited some.

After she went into the nursing home Mom’s friend, Nina, would pop in early on Saturday or Sunday mornings and attempt to cajole Mom into eating something. Sometimes I would come in and catch Nina standing by Mom’s bed holding her hand, or attempting to cheer her up in some way. In fact, she was Mother’s first visitor in the nursing home and was one of the last friends to see Mother alive. She was a dear, dear friend to be so loyal and to come by as often as she did. Like me, she often left Mom’s room in tears remembering the vibrant lady my mother once was.

Nina was unable to make it to the funeral home after Mom passed. Many of Mom’s highschool friends deluged my sister and I with Nina’s apologies. Her house had just sold and the closing simply couldn’t be rearranged. She was afraid the other party would back out. My sister and I understood. A few days after the funeral she called to apologize directly to me and I told her she had already done above and beyond what she was supposed to. She had helped Mother while she was alive and that meant so much to Sister Dear and I.

Nina and I continued to talk for a bit. She was concerned about finding a new house. She and her husband had little time before the new owner took possession, and they weren’t looking forward to the move. We spoke of the funeral and how all three of Mother’s grandchildren had taken part in the service. I spoke of my in-laws telling Nina they were in Tennessee when Mother left us and for many different reasons they couldn’t get home for the service. As I told Nina how wonderful my in-laws are she suddenly made a connection between my last name and the name I was calling my father-in-law by. She said, “Is your father-in-law ……?” I told her yes, and she explained that she had worked with my husband’s father for several years before she retired.

We both decided it was indeed a small world, but is it?

The past is chock-full of different types of coincidences.

During the production of The Wizard of Oz the costume department purchased many of the articles of clothing used in the movie from second-hand stores. At some point it was discovered that the jacket purchased for Professor Marvel had indeed belonged to L. Frank Baum, the author of the book the movie is based on.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

The 1519 arrival in Mexico of Hernan Cortes precisely matched a prediction by the Mayan Calendar that a pale-faced god named Quetzalcoatl would return and claim Tenochtitlan.

Two different Umbertos were shot dead in Italy on July 29, 1900. The first Umberto was Umberto I, the King of Italy. The second was a restaurant owner in the city of Monza. That is coincidence enough, however, both men favored each other in looks and both had wives with the same first name. The King’s coronation and the opening of the restaurant occurred on the same day. And……I certainly don’t want to leave out the fact that King Umberto had dinner in the other Umberto’s restaurant the night before the King was assassinated. The real kicker? The restaurant owning Umberto was also shot dead on the same day.

Harriet Tubman, the mother of the fight against slavery died in 1913. That same year the lady who would become a symbol of the struggle for civil rights was born. Her name? Rosa Parks.

Sometimes in history we find unexplained repetition regarding numbers. Benjamin Franklin was born on the 17th, including Franklin his parents had 17 children, Franklin ran away on the 17th, and he died on the 17th.

Even nature has coincidences. As we gaze upward at night we always see the same image of the moon. Actually, the moon rotates and revolves around the Earth. Amazingly it does both at the same speed. The same side of the moon is always in synch with the Earth. A random occurrence? Hmmmm…..

Search the web and you can find all sorts of coincidences. Some revolve around the year 1066 and the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944. There are coincidences involving 9/11 as well as the over-referred to coincidences between the assassination of JFK and Abraham Lincoln. There are even several coincidences involving NASA.

There are many theories to explain strange relationships and occurrences throughout history. Some theories take on wild explanations involving conspiracies. Littlewood’s Law explains coincidence by stating that if the sample size is large enough anything can happen and on the average one can expect a miracle at least once a month. If that’s true then Littlewood owes me a few.

One particular theory is Synchronicity propsed primarily by Carl Jung. Wikipedia states this theory involves “temporally coincident occurrences of acasual events.” Huh? What that means is the human mind finds meaning and significance where there is none. These coincidences occur because of a strong need in the individual to make connections.

Many people have read Jung’s book titled Synchronicity. On the cover of their 1983 album, Synchronicity, The Police refer to Jung’s book. I still have the album which shows Sting reading a copy of Jung’s book and different images of actual text from the book appear on the front as well as the back cover.

Another theorist, Arthur Koestler, “attempts to link Quantum Mechanics with neutrinos and their interactions with time” per Wikipedia. Again, my reaction is…..Huh? Apparently a character in the movie V For Vendetta is seen reading Koestler’s book, The Roots of Coincidence. Another book by Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, uses a phrase by British philosopher Gilbert Ryles as the title. Koestler felt “as the human brain has grown, it has built upon earlier more primitive brain structures and that these are ghosts….” So coincidences are actually imprints from an earlier time or memory? I guess that would explain why another album by The Police is named Ghost in the Machine, huh?

Albert Einstein, a very learned man well versed in Physics is quoted as saying, “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” I agree with my friend Albert. As a Christian I cannot believe something happens simply because of randomness. I also have a hard time believing that all coincidences occur simply because I create meaning for them, or that they occur because man has a collective conscience, an imprint from earlier times a la Koestler? Nope, I don’t buy it.

When the movie Magnolia was finally was released to pay-per-view I watched portions of it. I didn’t really like it. The characters had too many problems, and I found it very depressing. However, one line in the movie touched me. One of the characters stated, “We may be through with history, but the past ain’t through with us.”

Periodically in your life there are people or people those people know that reappear every so often in your life to impact it in some way. Sometimes you realize it. Sometimes you have no idea. These random acts are not random at all. A higher power is at work in my view.

It would make sense of course that from this point on my sister and I might hear from Mom’s friend Nina through a Christmas card or occaisional note. However, a higher power had a different plan.

Today, nearly a month after my conversation with Nina Sister Dear called. She said, “I have to tell you something because only you would think this is strange.”

“Okay, hit me with your best shot,” I said.

Sister Dear proceeded to tell me about a house in a town outside of Atlanta that her husband kept driving by. The house had a ‘for sale by owner’ sign in the yard. This is not the town where my sister lives. In fact, it is several miles away from their home, but my brother-in-law is there periodically because he has family there. He finally stopped at this house and gave the elderly owners his business card and told them when they were ready for a real estate agent he was their man. He checked back with them a couple of times and finally they gave him the listing.

This morning my full time brother-in-law, part-time real estate agent showed this particular house to another “retired” couple. They loved the house and decided to buy it. It seems they had already sold their house and were getting anxious to find a home they liked. Brother-in-law not only will act as the seller’s agent but will also be the buyer’s agent as well. A double whammy as it were!

Guess who the buyers are? You guessed it…Mother’s dear friend, Nina and her husband. During their discussion Brother-in-law’s last name made a connection in Nina’s brain and she asked if he was married to my sister. He confirmed it and everyone was simply shocked.

Well, there was only one thing I could say to Sister Dear. “It was Mother, Sister Dear,” I said. “She had a hand in this. She must have put a bug in the Big Guy’s ear.”

Sister Dear said, “You know, I thought the same thing.”

As I hung up the phone I softy said to the air around me, “Thank you, Mother. I love you!"

The Human Kind Revisited

Thank you to everyone who posted after my first acknowledgment found here. I really appreciate it.

NYC Educator at NYC Educator apologized for being late with his sentiments. Dear, we may be from opposite ends of the east coast, but showing concern for someone is what matters….not the timing. Thanks. Ditto to Janet at the The Art of Getting By. I agree, life is what happens when you are making other plans.

Chance over at The Sapient Sutler left me some very appropriate lyrics from Bob Dylan. Thanks!

Dennis over at From the Trenches of Public Ed. gave me a link and expressed concern. He also confided he is facing his own parent’s journey with Alzheimers. My step-grandmother had it, and currently I have an uncle who is living with it. I’m sorry…..

Ms. Cornelius over at A Shrewdness of Apes must be an absolute God-send at her school if she exhibits one-eighth the amount of caring she shows any of us when we have an emotional upheaval. She has been more than supportive by posting about my situation and even calling me a Steel Magnolia. I don’t know about that, but I appreciate it.

Kontan from Kontan's Place, is someone I can always count on for support when I need it most. Thanks!

Bellezza from Never Cease to Learn, a new visitor, felt compelled to comment regarding my comments concerning Mom’s Bible. Welcome, Beleeza! I can’t wait to visit you, and thanks for your comments.

And finally… and apology of sorts. I want to say thank you to the person who nominated my post “July 4, 1776, An Imagi-Holiday” to the History Carnival sometime during the week of July 17th. I also want to apologize to the many, many folks who dropped by to read the post and instead were subjected to an arrogant attempt by a reader to put me in my place. My response to the person, someone who had never commented here before, explains the situation far better than I can here. You can see the post and comments here. I was unaware that the post was in the carnival and the tone of the comments just really set me off considering what I had gone through that day. In defense of the person who commented it is very possible that he linked to me through the carnival and would not have been aware of my situation. At any rate……I welcome comments, even comments that call me a terrible teacher and call me pathetic, but I do reserve the right to respond or not. :)

A Few Quiet Mornings Left

It’s a quiet morning here except for the sound of the washing machine and the steady stream of “fair and balanced news” coming from the Middle East emitting from my bedroom television.

Both kidlets plus one friend are still asleep, and hubby left for his business an hour ago. I have a few, very few, precious mornings like this left before I am required to report to my campus for preplanning.

Students report to school next Friday, August 4th, for their first day of school. Yikes! This means my preplanning begins next Monday. Double yikes!

My classroom is a wreck. Every cabinet, bookshelf, desk, table, chartstand, and chair will have to return to its appropriate spot as everything was shoved to one side back in June for carpet cleaning. This was a good thing since two of my precious ones took to throwing up on my carpet last year. I have avoided the spots ever since.

My school was the recipient of an e-rate grant this summer so our televisions have been upgraded, a telephone system has been installed, a new bell system, and we now have cameras in our hallways and out side our building. Fantastic! However, my television was moved from one corner to the opposite one. I’m hoping the wiring is still there to use the tv as a computer monitor when I need to do a power point or show some other kind of image.

I guess I need to corral my school’s computer guru and pinpoint him regarding some of my personal issues. I want to make sure that I can still show clips of videos from United Streaming so that the picture is the right size and the sound comes through. I want to use a classroom blog with my writing students so they can use the comment feature to peer analyze and critique. Our filters are so strong any type of web journal simply won’t come through without the guru approving the URL.

Our Leadership meeting was yesterday. It was nice to get back with everyone and I had much love and support from my colleagues due to my recent loss.

I still have scads of thank-yous to write. Mother would kill me if she knew I still had not gotten to this. She was always very prompt as a fine Southern lady should be. I still have a few to do from my world of blog, and I will.

Now that it is time to become a teacher again I will start my ever expanding “TO DO LIST” and all of those people who need to be thanked will be entered upon the list along with things like “finish regions power point”, “copy units for Connie”, “complete team agenda for meeting”, etc.

One of the best feelings in the world is to cross an item off your “TO DO LIST” and make it a “TA-DAH!”…..something finished….something accomplished…..something earned.

I want to get back to normal, but normal has changed. I’m still in the “TO DO” stage with all that has occurred, and that’s ok.

It’s going to take some time to get normal to feel right again and turn all of this around from a “TO DO” to a “TA-DAH”, but I will do it….in time.

Bibles...Recorded History

Bibles are wonderful things, of course. They guide some of us in our religious lives. They provide a history for the Hebrew people, the beginnings of the Christian church, as well as document other groups of people thriving in ancient times. The Bible is one of the world’s best works of literature. Bibles also become very personal to the owner as they usually contain information regarding the history of the owner, or series of owners, in some cases. By examining someone’s Bible you can determine past addresses, important dates within a family, and particular passages that guided the owner. Tucked between the pages you can discover items that the owner held dear and precious.

Most people cannot bring themselves to throw or give a Bible away. They are valuable objects, and the fact that some distant relative took the time to record family births, deaths, and marriages within the front and back pages make the book even more dear. I have several that belonged to my grandfather and now two more have been added to my collection.

In short…Bibles give us a compass for our future while cementing our feet in our past. There is no way to forget your family’s past if you have a family Bible.

During the course of the weekend my sister and I hurriedly ransacked our Rubbermaid containers labeled ‘mother’ that we had packed up, divided among us, and stored at our respective homes almost four years ago as mother left her apartment for the nursing home. We refused to get rid of anything in case she asked for it. I just couldn’t stand the thought of her sweet face looking up from her bed and asking, “Hon, where’s that pansy writing paper you gave me three years ago for Mother’s Day? I want to write a letter.” Or, even worse, “Sweetie, I’m tired of looking at that crystal candy dish. I want the one Sara and Fauscett gave me….you know, the one that used to sit on the coffee table at Red Oak.” I simply didn’t want to have to say she no longer owned something so between my sister and I everything was stored.

Mother’s casket was closed for the majority of the visitation period at her request. Therefore, sister and I wanted to have as many pictures of mother as possible set out around the two rooms we were given. We wanted to put out pictures of her with us, with my dad (even though they were divorced), with her family, as a child, and with her friends. Between the two of us we did really well. There were pictures everywhere and many of mother’s highschool friends had a great time trying to figure out who was who in some of them. After many years of sickness it was great therapy for all of us to be surrounded by images of the Geri we all all remember whether we remembered her as sister, wife, mother, aunt, cousin, or friend.

One of the things I came across as I hurriedly grabbed pictures was Mother’s Bible. She had used two for several years. After her father’s death in 1984 she had begun using The Living Bible that my sister and I had given our grandfather as a gift in 1977. His writing is all over the inside covers, passages are underlined, and an occaisional slip of paper with his handwriting can be found between the pages. Mother’s Bible is, of course, a King James version, published by The World Publishing Company. I couldn’t locate a date of publishing. The address she wrote in the front was the first house my mother and father bought together in Atlanta close to my Aunt Boofie ( I wrote about her here). Mother’s neat handwriting abounds in this Bible. The dates and details of my sister’s baptism and wedding, my baptism and wedding, the date Mother moved her letter of membership to another church, certain passages that meant something to her: what to read during times of death, passages concerning types of dress for men and women, a reminder of where the “seasons” passage can be found (Ecclesiastes 3:1); and passages every Baptist is concerned about at one time or another regarding tithing. Romans, her favorite chapter is underlined heavily. The pages are yellow, the cover is brittle, the picture in the front is a rendering of the prodigal son’s return to his father’s arms. I remember sitting next to her in church on Sunday mornings thumbing through her Bible and always stopping at the picture and gazing at it since I couldn’t yet read. I always thought the white bearded man was God welcoming people to Heaven.

The real treasure mine of Mother’s Bible was the “stuff” she had placed within the pages. Various bookmarks folks had given her with their names inscribed on the back with a laundry marker on the back so she wouldn’t forget who gave it to her. Several cards from my sister and I for birthdays and Mother’s Day. A scrap of paper that my cousin Nathan wrote on when he was a much younger child. He was writing a letter to my mom alongside his grandmother. When his grandmother put her letter in the evelope she included Nathan’s letter to Geri, too. I couldn’t help smile as I looked at it. Mother had written on it exactly who had scribbled on the paper, why, and when. Nathan is now a very handsome young man and I’m going to make a copy of the paper to keep and send his mother the original for her to place between the pages of her Bible. A memory passed along…..a story for a future father to tell when he goes through his mother’s Bible…..life does have a way of carrying on, doesn’t it?

Notes from friends, old church bulletins, copies of letters she wrote to her old church and pictures. There is a five by seven picture of my sister and her husband on their wedding day. There is another picture showing the first house my mom and dad built together. It’s down the road from where my dad lives now. It’s a huge home. We never lived there……..I wonder why mom kept a picture in her Bible of that house. Maybe she liked to remember the good times we had there while it was under construction before she and my father divorced.

Several obituaries were found within the pages as well----my grandfather, my grandmother, my mother’s half-brother, many other family members as well. I carefully replaced them. I believe they should stay where she had them. Afterall, these things are treasures and someone else in the future will enjoy their find.

I looked up some information about Bibles. You can see several images of English and American Bibles here and here.

Sometimes we don’t need a history textbook or some heavy tome to discover where we’ve been. Sometimes, all we need to do is grab our family Bible.

Your past is waiting for you within its pages.

The Human Kind

I’m tired, sad, joyful, and hopeful all at the same time with a whole lot of weird thrown in. That really sounds like I’m a child of the seventies, but I am, and I can’t help it. I don’t know any other way to explain my thoughts and feelings over the last few days. However, groovy and neat-o certainly don’t fit the bill.

Thank you to each one of you who left a comment concerning my mother’s death. I appreciate the effort on your part. There is no way for me to express what your concern means to me, so in my meager efforts to express my feelings I will do the only the thing I can in the blogging world…..I’ll give you a link back.

Many thanks to Dan over at A History Teacher, the Rain over at I Thought a Think, Ms-Teacher at Ms. Teacher, and Lady S at Lady Strathconn's Journal for their kind words.

Spangles and Anonymous need a big thank-you as well, but I don’t have a place to link for you.

Ms. Cornelius at Shrewdness of Apes, Mike at Education in Texas, and 40 over at Fordee Blog have been through this before and I appreciate the support. We have been appointed membership in a club we don’t want to belong to. Maybe you, dear reader, are also a member of that club.

Polski3, I appreciate your optimism. We tend to think alike on many things. Thanks!

Mr. Lawrence over at Get Lost Mr. Chips had kind words and so did Q's Personal Legend. Q, I agree with you about Mom’s picture. So far it is the best one we have of her in her prime.

Californiateacherguy over at California Teacher Guy sent kind words as well as linked to me from his group blog LiveWire: Teaching in the Golden State to let others know. CTG, are you sure you’re not from the South? What hospitality!

Dekerivers at Caffeinated Politics sent some lovely, appropriate lyrics. Thanks!

Butterfly Angel at Butterfly Angel was so right with her kind words….”God will be our strength and we fly like the eagle…”

and last but not least…..Sumir at Sumir-History your email meant so much to me. My mother would be most impressed that through this “blogging hobby” of mine, as she referred to it, someone an entire world away would hear of her death and think of her and me. Thank you Sumir for showing what a small world we really live on.

We are one “kind” when you consider all things….humankind.

Thank you, my friends, for reconfirming that for me. :)

This Isn't the Post I Had Planned......

I had planned to post all of the links and images everyone sent me for my previous post. I really appreciate the way each of you played along with me as I had a little fun with the 100th school day theme. I needed a little fun last week as it has been a difficult few days.

My beloved mother went to Heaven at 1:45 in the morning on Saturday, July 15, 2006. She had been very ill for many years, and had lived in a nursing home for four years. The past month has been difficult for her as she entered her last days. She no longer hurts, she no longer fights for her next breath, and she no longer has to suffer the indignities her illness had brought her.

My sister and I have been going through pictures getting ready for Mother’s memorial service. After witnesses her slow decline and the ravages her illness had taken on her body I was simply aghast when this image came in an email from my sister. My mother was absolutely gorgeous. We are hoping one of our relatives can tell us where and when it was made. I had never seen this picture before which is surprising because I always ransacked the house looking through picture boxes.

This is THE way I want to remember her----young and beautiful.

I am going to take a few days off from my blog to take care of my family and myself.

I’ll be back soon. :(

Scavenging For My Past, Part 4

Last night I finally felt I could sit down and write about the visit I made to my old home site. I’ve thought about it for a couple of days and have written some things down in longhand….a section here and section there….ideas that fit some of the pictures I made….a note to myself regarding a thought I want to make sure I include, but this section of my scavenger hunt was difficult and I’m still trying to sort out why.

Part one of my scavenger hunt can be read here, part two here, and part three here.

The product I ended up with last night was Historians Observe Their Surroundings. At some point I had to make a choice…continue on the path of explaining my lesson on how history changes a piece of property or launch into my hunt for my childhood home. They are both linked but contained far too much material for one post so I opted for the lesson piece and once again put off facing my past. It is funny how some ideas just seem to erupt and tumble out of me while others stay locked in my brain and just churn away like the agitator on a washing machine.

The first picture you see is my dad, my sister, and I on the front steps that led up to our Red Oak home. You can barely see the large front porch that I wrote about a few days earlier here. I won’t tell you which one I am, but I’m not the one in the middle! History has changed the landscape behind us. The picture below shows the same view except it is taken approximately 300 feet further back and across the track. The raised plot of ground our house sat on is gone, the front steps where we sat is gone, the trees that gave our porch privacy are gone, and the house is gone………gone.



Think about the plot of land that you live on. What was there ten years ago? One hundred years ago? One thousand years ago? Ten thousand years ago? Maybe you’ve seen the more recent version of the movie The Time Machine where the main character activates the machine and you see the scenery change around him as he advances or goes back in time. It’s a really fascinating scene to me as it advances in rapid time and you see things being torn down or built up or over other things.

Think about it seriously as you move about your day…..are you walking the same steps as a wooly mammoth? Or are you sitting in the same spot a Confederate soldier lay dying? Are your children playing in a spot a young Native American child called his or her special place? Is there an old family home at the bottom of the lake you water ski on or skim across as you try to find that perfect fishing spot?

Maybe that’s what got to me this week as I visited childhood places. Things move too fast these days. During our lifetime we see many changes in the landscapes we live in. The people who inhabited the Earth before us rarely saw major changes in their lifetime or left the areas they grew up in for that matter. Many people lived and died on the same plot of land. Most of the students in my classroom have already lived in at least three places or more. Is it any wonder we have lost our attachment to our land?

As I traveled up Roosevelt Highway from Red Oak I saw the same scene I had seen as a child. Ahead of me on up the road was the green steel span of the bridge where Interstate 285 crosses the highway. We always used the bridge as a frame of reference for folks trying to find our house…..if you get to the bridge you’ve gone too far…we'd say. I reached my street which at one time was called West Point Road, but I don’t know why. It doesn’t go anywhere. Maybe at one time it actually did. In my day it crossed the track and became the drive and parking lot for the lumber yard my dad managed. It was the only way in and out of the property which caused my mom some concern through the years as she never wanted to need a fire truck or ambulance only to have a train stop on the track.

Making the right turn off Roosevelt Highway I crossed the railroad track. Once on the other side I found myself in an environment that felt so familiar yet looked so alien. Down in the very core of my soul I could feel I was in familiar territory yet nothing, nothing was as it should be. A glass recycling plant now sits on the property. Large mountains of glass bottles dot the grounds and crushed glass carpeted the asphalt.






I felt kind of silly as I walked into the office and announced who I was. The plant personnel were very kind, but unfortunately they couldn’t tell me anything. They did not buy the property from my dad’s employer after the fire. One nice man handed me a bright orange business card and said, “Call this guy, I bet he can tell you about your old house. He owned the property before us.” I said I would and then asked permission to walk the property and take some pictures. They were very nice to allow me to do that.

I walked around to the back of the plant. It was the area where the showroom had a huge warehouse with four aisles filled with all types of doors, mouldings, sheetrock, nails, etc. Customers would come around to the back where the aisle doors opened up to a very large dock where trucks and cars could be loaded up. Dad used to have large contractor dinners where he would invite all the builders in the area and their wives for steak dinners. We’d place grills on the dock and set up long tables. All the employees would stay after work and help out along with my mom, sister, and I. Dad always expected my sister and I to make nice and behave. I absolutely loved these customers….they were family….we went to church with some of them, and my sister and I went to school with their kids. Twice a year Dad would have inventory in the showroom and warehouse and even as a young girl I was assigned something to count. During annual sales Dad would set up a hot dog stand and employ my sister and I to man it. The best fun was having the whole run of the place. I used my status as the boss’ daughter to the hilt. There wasn’t a nook or cranny on that property that I didn’t know or visit daily whether on my bike or a golf cart that Dad bought for us to “play” with. On busy summer days I wound my way in and out of large delivery trucks, customer’s cars coming and going, and even obnoxiously rode my bike in the showroom saying excuse me as I edge by customers trying to choose a new bathroom sink or replacement door. I don’t think Home Depot would put up with that, but they don’t provide steak dinners to their best customers either, as far as I know.

When you visit a piece of property that has changed so drastically you look for landmarks…anything to give you that frame of reference so you can determine where past structures were. I tried, I really tried, but I couldn’t make too many determinations until I walked back out to the railroad track and looked back towards where I knew the house should be. Do you see the metal scale sticking up from the asphalt in this shot? The raised plot of ground my house sat on was somewhere right there.



As I re-crossed the track I took this picture looking back towards Red Oak.



I thought about all the times I had stood on the track looking in the same direction. I thought about all the pennies we had laid on the track waiting for the train to flatten them to flitters. I thought about how at four years old I was so scared of the train that I could hear it coming from miles away. I would go tearing into the house before it could come. It was quite sometime before I would stay outside to watch the train go by, but I eventually became brave enough. I looked around at all the changes to this plot of ground I had called home for so long and as I looked down the track towards Red Oak I remembered all along the track that stretched before me Union soldiers had disrupted the lines during their march to Rough and Ready as part of Sherman’s March to the Sea. I wondered what the land looked like then. Finally I remembered how I used to balance on the rails, one foot in front of the other to see how fast and how far I could go. So, if you had been traveling down Roosevelt Highway a few days ago you would have seen a crazy, forty-something, overweight woman trying to recapture her childhood by recreating a balancing act on a train rail. Let’s just say I’m out of practice.

On the way home I pulled out the card the man had given me at the glass recycling place. If my home exists the man listed on the card may have the information I need. Unfortunately he is out of town until after the fourth of July. Guess we’ll have to wait a few more days for more definitive information.

The night I came home from walking the old property I was thoughtful about it…in fact I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I had one of those up and down kind of nights, and unfortunately hubby paid the price. I disturbed him all night long. I think he’ll be glad when my scavenger hunt is over.

As I tried over the last couple of days to write this I uploaded my pictures and got them ready to place. As I walked around the property I was really taken with all of the shards of broken glass everywhere I looked. Even though it was a devastated looking landscape compared to what I remembered the sun made all of the glass sparkle and shine, and I knew I had to snap a picture of it. I held the camera out in front of me and snapped the ground not really caring about what I snapped as long as I had a carpet of glass in the picture. Of course being the klutz that I am I managed to get my shadow in the picture so I had to crop it to cut me out of it. As I looked at my finished picture I was amazed. Do you see what I see on the lower right side? A penny! I walked that whole lot. I could have taken a picture of any spot at any time and something had me choose the spot with a penny.



I take the penny as a sign… a sign that man goes on shaping and reshaping his landscape. It’s up to us as caretakers to catalog and index how we use the land so that others who come after us can appreciate the wonderful resource that land can be. In this way all of our stories, good and bad, won’t be forgotten.