Yesterday would have been my oldest brother's 70th birthday. He didn't quite live long enough to see it; he died three days after Valentine's day…primarily significant in our family as being the anniversary of our mother's wake. My brother was buried him in the final hours of a blizzard which had raged for two days in Wisconsin…on our little brother's 50th birthday. The grave is near those of our parents and paternal grandparents. Monday will be the 100th anniversary our paternal grandparents naturalization as U.S. citizens, seven years to the month after they left their homeland.
The day before the funeral, I rose well before dawn to give my pooties enough food and water to last a few days, and packed the rental car and drove like crazy trying to beat the oncoming blizzard. Unfortunately, after being on the road six and a half hours I was still 60 miles from my destination…normally three and a half hour trip…I gave up for the night and checked into a hotel and collapsed in front of the television. The primary stories in front of me alternated between the raging blizzard and the raging protests against the governor of my native state, and I in turn raged against both.
This is perhaps not the usual sort of genealogy and family history diary, but to me the most important discoveries in my research have been how the history of my ancestors has shaped my life today. I am in a meta mood this weekend; join me after the squiggle as I try to tie some of my musings together into an explanation of how I could never be a republican.
Along with many baby boomers, I was an avid fan of the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, where the resident vampire used the red herring of being an English cousin writing a family history to account for his vast knowledge of people living 200 years before. The idea of writing a family history caught my fancy—even though our family wasn't rich or famous, I wanted to do that! As years went by, I would pour over booklets put together for our family reunion, looking for clues. But dad's parents had emigrated from The Netherlands, and I didn't see a practical way to research earlier generations. Mom's family had a little more promise; in the early 1980s one of her sisters found an old bio of their paternal grandfather published in a 1912 county history. Old Calvin—born in 1829 during Andrew Jackson's administration and died in 1918 during Woodrow Wilson's—gave an extensive account of life, and that of his parents, where he lived, when he moved there, and also mentioned he had a g-grandfather who fought in the Revolution. An exciting find, and I recall promising my mother I would research this so that I could join the DAR and shake it up (this was the era Phyllis Schlafly type were prominent in DAR leadership).
Mom died a few years later, before I could fulfill that promise. A few years into the 1990s, however, brought some surprising advances in Dad's family…a distant relative in the Netherlands contacted us looking for genealogical info on the American branch! Dad was able to travel to meet him, and see the house his father had grown up in, and he met the widow of a half-uncle he never knew existed. Still, with more names and dates in hand and the advent of the internet to expedite the search, I procrastinated.
It was not until after Dad's death a few years ago that I really got serious in my search. On my journey, I discovered my Mom's descent from the Mullins and Aldens of the Mayflower, and Revolutionary War patriots and loyalists, and just how early (1845) her ancestors started settling in Wisconsin. I also was able to trace Dad's paternal line to the early 1600s in the Netherlands. In some other diary I'll talk about how that happened, and just what goes into the two-inch thick stacks of evidence I submitted to the Mayflower Society and why the stack that went to the DAR on the same ancestral line was thicker.
Early last year, with the pretty certificates hanging on the wall nearly obscured by stacks of paper on every shelf in my den and scanned notes and downloaded citations clogging my computer, I felt an urgent need to write that family history. My brother's health was not good, and my elderly relatives not getting any younger—nor did I really have any excuse to say I didn't have any information. So I set about trying to weed out the undocumented lines, organize the chapters, and scanning photos and documents I wanted to include. More about that later, but eventually I had 600 pages devoted to Mom's family and 100 on Dad's sent off to be printed and bound, and the finished product shipped in November in plenty of time for my brother to see. After that, he was occupied in cheering his beloved Packers to win the final Superbowl he would see.
As I mentioned earlier, my family was not rich or famous for anything. My parents were depression era kids, too poor for good food and clothing much less the money for education—Dad completed 8th grade, Mom had two years of high school. That said, they were intelligent, intellectually curious, and hard workers. During the early years of their marriage, before Dad was in a union, there was no health insurance, no paid vacations, no job security, and certainly no way to save for retirement. The tales of their struggles to get by while raising children are enough to make anyone weep. It is simply astounding how quickly things improved after my Dad started driving trucks and became a member of Teamsters' union. My parents always made sure that we understood how lucky we were to grow up in a union family.
After having researched both sides of my family, I think belief in unions is definitely in the genes. My g-grandfather Calvin was well into his 80s when he gave his bio for the 1912 county history. He had homesteaded his farm in the 1850s, and his orchards and expertise in cultivating new varieties of fruit were well-known in the region. In temperament, he was somewhat patriarchal and dictatorial (I'll tell you about his will sometime), but he stated in the article that while he was politically independent, he was a strong believer in socialism—no doubt he had some strong opinions on the railroad barons and their rates for transporting crops to market.
On Dad's side of the family, one of the more remarkable things for me was how I was able to document the line back to the 17th century. In The Netherlands, surnames passing from generation to generation was not the norm—laws requiring the adoption of generational surnames did not go into effect until 1811. Yet I was able to document our surname back to about 1650—turns out our name is a guild name. Each generation was in the guild for the next 170 years or so until the Industrial Revolution had effectly eliminated the cottage craftsmen; after that, my Dad's ancestors worked as day laborers or farm laborers. His own father worked at various odd jobs until giving up and moving his young family to America, where he was told "pigeons would fly into your mouth." While that did not exactly happen, there is certainly a strong family pattern that Dad would have picked up on in his youth and influenced his own belief in the benefits unionized labor would provide.
My oldest brother, 15 years my senior, came of age in the early 1960s…a time when a high school education and some specialized technical training was still a ticket to a good job and a secure future for raising a family. Though much more conservative than I was—he was strong in his belief that it was a man's job to take care of the family—he was a union man, and active in leading his local chapter. The union busting of the Reagan years were devastating to him…as many others can attest, nothing has been the same since. Still, he persevered until his retirement…particularly since giving up the fight would have meant no retirement. Fortunately for him, he was too ill toward the end to be aware of the struggles brought on by the current governor of Wisconsin against the public unions. All this said, I don't think my family history is all that unique. There are plenty of people in Wisconsin with similar stories—not limited to my many gazillion relatives.
I won't name the governor in question – he is too despicable in his actions and point of view to name. Maybe we can call him Lord Voldemort (hmmm, I do have a Hindrik Potter in my family tree). I don't pretend to understand Voldemort, or what makes him tick (other than rich republican donors). It is clear he doesn't understand what makes Wisconsin tick. Maybe because he is not native to Wisconsin—I know he was only ten when his family moved there, but sometimes people never get around to understanding the culture of their adopted neighbors…perhaps that is an explanation. He certainly doesn't seem to have the life experiences of the blue collar kid from the Midwest. That is not a negative in and of itself, but lack of understanding of the history of his constituency is in excusable.
Lately, this lack of intellectual curiosity for anything outside of the four walls of their houses seems to be the common denominator in the republican party. No compassion for fellow human beings, no understanding of how man-made climate change is causing blizzards, flooding, drought is evident among Voldemort's crowd. Unlike Harry Potter, I have no magic to fight against Voldemort's deatheaters, but it is in my blood to resist them, loudly, every step of the way. And that's all I have to say today.