Stories My Father Never Told Me

Aivazovsky_-_Strong_WindMine is not a family of storytellers. I don’t know what my father did in World War II. I don’t know if his heart skipped a beat the first time he saw his future wife, my mother. I don’t know if there was an instant he doubted he would live when his sailboat was torn to toothpicks in a hurricane a mile off the Florida coast. That was an event. But he never made it a story to pass on to his children. And so I don’t know why or how he made it to shore across a mile of stormy seas, only that he did.

It might sound funny to wonder why he survived. But plenty of people wouldn’t have made it. Even people with the swimming skills and physical strength to make it. You also need a powerful will to live and the courage to face what look like insurmountable odds. He was sailing solo, so there was no one else to help make the decision to ride out the storm with the ship or to brave the raging seas. There was no easier choice to just follow someone else’s lead. Decisions don’t come any harder than the ones he had to make in his life. This was only foreshadowing what was to come. Stormy SeasDid he quickly calculate his odds and swim for shore as soon as he saw the boat was foundering, or did he try to hold her together till there was no hope left, braving seas that were by that time dramatically worse to try and save the boat he had lovingly built by hand? Did he risk going down with the ship by groping frantically through rising waters in the below-deck cabin for one treasured belonging he couldn’t bear to leave behind? If he did, what was so valuable that he risked his life over retrieving it? And when he reached shore did he walk away unscathed, or were his nights haunted with nightmares of drowning? A sea of churning water stood between him and life on that…that what? I don’t even know if it was night or day. Either way, he lived to not tell about it.

As a child I one time skipped down barefoot onto a gnarl of fish hook cactus that lodged deep in the sole of my foot. My father came toward me to take it out and I warned him away with screams and tears. He laughed and asked if I intended to leave it there forever. Without an ounce of bravery, I had to think about it for a minute. If it had been me in that sinking boat, the smallest doubt of whether I could swim over raging seas and make it to land alive would have had me clutching to the last bit of floating debris of that boat like it was God Himself, and only He could save me from being swallowed by the sea. My fate would rest on how buoyant my bit of detritus was. I would use all my strength trying to make that shard of timber float, unable to trust my ability to survive a swim to shore.

Cast up by the Sea - Winslow HomerNo such complications for my father. All my life he whistled while he shaved, sang while he worked, and went about his business with good cheer. Each day was a new opportunity to enjoy life, and whatever stories his past held, that’s where they stayed. When I grew up and became interested in him as a person as well as a father, one day I asked how he had the sheer guts and strength to get up and go back to work shortly after breaking his back and being paralyzed (for life) at 35. All he said was, “I had to, I had a family to feed.” Those words were plenty to tell me what he was made of, but I wanted all the elements of plot. I wanted the how and the why, and the who, what, and whereAnd yet I didn’t have the guts to ask.

I wasn’t born yet when he fell off the roof of their new home and into a wheelbarrow, but I hurt to even think of all the crashing of bones and nerves and hearts and hopes and dreams that started when his body came freefalling onto the edge of that wheelbarrow spine-first. I wonder about the pain, how scared he must have been, how dashed his dreams, how fearful for his future, no less his pregnant wife’s and two young sons’.

In the hospital after his injury doctors tickled his feet. They poked his calves and pressed their fingers into his thighs. Nothing. No feeling. So they wouldn’t operate. They said it was no use. My grandmother stormed the hospital and they relented, slicing a 14-inch gash down his back. They poked around a bit, sewed him back up, and said, “Yep. He’ll never walk again.” He didn’t talk for a month. Then he dragged himself out of the hospital, stuffed his bodycasted self in the family Jeep with my mother and brothers, and said goodbye to their new home in Denver. They couldn’t think clearly there. They needed to re-gather their lives within the familiarity of the house they still owned in California, among loving family and concerned friends. For the next six months he taught himself to walk with a complex series of movements that began with swinging his hips and legs forward with the strength of his glutes. When his uncle, Pappy we called him, told him it was time to saw off his body cast and see what he had, that’s what he did. After fits and starts he began walking with two canes, then one, then finally none. Still with no feeling below his hips. But it was something. A miracle of the will.

After the injury he developed other strengths. His arms could hold all us children at once. His calm could make any problem, however seemingly tragic at first, suddenly approachable. His courage could hold the weight of all our worlds on his shoulders. But part of that courage came by refusing to consider himself in any way but like everybody else. He simply refused to treat himself as paralyzed, and damned if anyone else would dare. So if I asked even the most innocuous question about his injury, would opening up and talking about it, satisfying his cherished daughter’s curiosity, open a hole that let all that long-ago pain come rushing back? I wouldn’t risk it.

Harrrison - Ocean NocturneThat’s what I know. And I wouldn’t ask him for more. It wasn’t really lack of courage that stopped me from asking. I know that now. It was respect. Every day my father lived his life as a man with full use of his body would. He never gave in to physical limitations, never mind self-pity. He would not use handicap parking spaces. He coached and umpired Pony League baseball. He climbed on roofs and pounded them with sheets of shingles whenever that needed to be done, and I doubt he ever considered that irony.

He was a man of few words and was a firm believer that the value of a person’s life is in his deeds. That didn’t make him hard. Quite the opposite. He knew what a man is capable of. But he also knew how a man can suffer. Just seeing my father and what he did every day was enough to tell me the worth of the man. I didn’t need to know how he made it to shore to know he was strong. I didn’t need to know what he did in the war to know he was brave.

All this happened. And it affected our lives in unimaginable ways. In aggregate the consequences of that accident hurled our little family off orbit. He spent months at a time in the hospital because of internal injuries and infections and other complications. My mother tried to hold it all together, keeping house and feeding and caring for her three beloved children plus being a more intimate nurse to her husband than she could have ever dreamed of. But her struggles are a different story. The family is still trying to regain its balance now, a decade after he’s gone and well into his grandchildren’s adulthood. We’ll make it. In another generation the pain won’t even be a memory. But the family will be strong. Partly because he refused to let us be weak.

When he was late into his 70’s, on kidney dialysis for some kind of a record dozen years, his speech a little slurred from mini-strokes and body wasted by decades of the complications of paralysis, it finally occurred to me that he was not immortal. I asked him to write his life story. I wanted to know whatever stories he wished to share with me. He said he would, and so he spent his days at dialysis filling notebooks. His hands weakened and his handwriting deteriorated. We got him a dictation recorder, but he didn’t want to bother his fellow dialysees. So he went on with the notebooks, filling them with barely legible sentences and paragraphs and pages, pouring out his life with clearly apparent joy at what he had lived. He started with his grandparents, describing their lives, and four yellow-lined legal notebooks later he ended with his own early adulthood. That’s as far as he got before passing away on August 31, 1997, at 1:55 in the morning.

He never got to the part about the sailboat. But that’s alright. I know everything that’s important about my father.

Art - Winslow Homer - Sunset Fires

Not a Free Spirit, Yet His Mind Wandered Free

You can see Chapters 1 and 2 of this story here, here, and here.

FRANCIS OTTO EGGLESTON: Chapter 4

Francis Eggleston spent his childhood on an Ohio farm, in an era when it was common for parents to take their children out of school after the fourth grade, or to skip sending them to school altogether.

OneRoomSchoolhouseFrancis’s family was different. For grammar school they sent their two boys to the “District School – all in one room from primer to as big as the teacher, but less learned.”

In his biography, he wrote that, “It meant a walk of more than one mile, but there was commonly company much of the way.

“The school house,” he went on, “was a frame building painted white. It was heated by a ‘box’ stove and when you were cold you held up your hand and asked if you could ‘go to the stove.’Harvey's Grammar

As with nearly every school of the time, “The curriculum consisted of reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic and geography and that crazy business of grammar, in which you parsed sentences after the ideas of the teacher and ‘Harvey’s Grammar’ – sentences about as scientific as a beech and maple woods.

Still, “It was good exercise for one’s brain cells. Once in a month you ‘spoke pieces’ and so learned to use your voice. There was singing if the teacher was a singer but no organ or piano.”

Twinsburg Institute original school buildingAfter this Francis and his brother both “went away to school,” to the Twinsburg Institute, a noted college preparatory school run by education reformer Samuel Bissell.

Though he never said specifically in his biography, Francis made it clear that he was not cut out for farm workand that, “I was a book worm of sorts from early days. A reader of the poets and dramatists; of Emerson, Theo Parker, Carlyle, Ruskin, and the like.” 

He was eager for all education, and entered one of the territory’s several colleges, Oberlin College, “at 16 or 17.”After reading Emerson and Carlyle and Ruskin, the poet, the dramatists, “and the like,” he was eager for more. His own reading could take him only to a certain level, and after that he needed a teacher to help him decide what it all means, and where to go from there.

But instead of finding it a temple to mental expansion, he found the university constricting, a place where a young man’s intellectual explorations were not encouraged, but were directed toward a set of values and beliefs.Oberlin 1906.pngNot that he believed any other university would be an improvement. “The educational enterprise as conducted in colleges in those days,” he wrote, “was that of channelization of the human mind — much like the ‘breaking’ of a colt to work in harness.”

Francis was a responsible young man who bowed to duty always, yet his mind wandered free and formed its own ideas, respective of prevailing doctrine or authority. He formed his own interpretations of the world, and was not easily subdued.

“I have always been a seeker,” he wrote, “rather than a safe deposit compartment.”

It’s because of this free-spiritedness that his life was a succession of one radical change after another. But because he was also dutiful, he tried to be a free spirit within the confines of the roles his place in society dictated.

Francis O. Eggleston, circa 1883

Francis O. Eggleston, circa 1883

As a son, a husband, and a father, his roles were clearly defined. How, then, could he find space for his spirit to soar within those defined edges?

“I readily inclined to the actor’s calling,” he wrote, “but human nature cuts many capers and we all have our own temperamental twists…. I was not so much a scholar as I was a lad for special occasions that called me out.”

He quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Our moods do not believe in each other.”

After matriculation at Oberlin he taught school for several years, but, as was written in his obituary 70 years later, “the pedagogic life was not to his complete satisfaction, and he entered Western Reserve University, from which he obtained a medical degree.”

He then married the one and only sweetheart he ever courted, and ventured from Ohio to Knoxville, Kentucky to begin life as an adult.

There, Francis Eggleston started his adult life as a physician, but after practicing medicine for three years he decided against continuing on in the profession.

“As for medicine and surgery,” he wrote, “I tire of butchery as an occupation.

“You never know what you will run into, the disintegrated flesh and scattered remnants of humanity make me prefer less sensitive elements.”

Indeed, he was too sensitive to practice medicine, and so he went back to Oberlin College to study a subject through which his spirit could soar, theology. He emerged a Methodist minister, and served for many years in churches in Ohio, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Francis Eggleston was certain in his beliefs, though those beliefs were always evolving. He constantly questioned beliefs, and especially, systems of belief, which is what brought him from Methodism to Unitarianism. He was a devoted student of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who at that time was famously Unitarian.

In his autobiography I found many references to the evolution of ideas, and of things. This must have been hard to reconcile with the life and duties of a Methodist minister, and perhaps it was part of the reason he evolved from that religion to Unitarianism.

FOE Eggleston bio page excerpt - change but cannot dieDarwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, yet it wasn’t until the 20th century that Darwin’s explanation of life was widely accepted by even the scientific community.

I don’t know if Grandfather accepted Darwin’s theory the first time he read it, or if he had to come to terms with it slowly, but at least by 1940 he was all in. He wrote:

“A changeless world could not exist — except as a dead moon. It could no have life even in its lowest forms. It may be said of all living things…. Only those who were alive before 1860 can measure the advances in many fundamental ideas and loss of fears from that remote period to 1941…. Mankind has advanced even more from the loss of superstitions than from the gains of positive elements…. I must accept this faith of human science or life will dwindle and hope perish.”

In another place, he wrote:

“Only a living world could be self-existent, or creative and progressive. The static conception of creation was of necessity mechanistic. Life is not for a moment inactive or finished. Such a world would contradict itself. In a living world man himself becomes a project: an enterprise. Society, made up of living persons, becomes a major project of measureless scope and infinite hope.

“We know now what a biologic continuum is and how it acts in our natures. Science is very explicit on this point. We do carry along germs of inheritance generation after generation — vital parts of ‘what we were before we became ourselves.'”

And in another place:

“I began life orthodox, and end a naturalist.”

“…the world is infinitely unfinished…life must be progress. The businessman may aspire to a competence and retirement from the grind of business. The student has no such wish. I have an expanding horizon, and no valued and cherished consistency.”

My great grandfather, Francis Otto Eggleston, was incredibly well read, as his biography includes references to and quotes from poets and thinkers ranging from ancient Greece to  the modern-day, all used to clarify or demonstrate his thoughts.FOE Eggleston bio excerpt - mental stimulation my need

If he had been brought up in a different place, or had he attended a different college, perhaps he would not have found such societal constriction of his spirit. Still, this was the Victorian era, and social pressure was great all across this country, in and out of its institutions.

As it is, Great Grandfather Eggleston found an outlet for his unconstricted thoughts and beliefs as a columnist and commentator for the Bergen Record, of Bergen County, New Jersey. He had free reign to speak his mind, and had a large audience with lively discussion through the readers’ responses in letters.

The Bergen Record’s obituary would have pleased Great Grandfather, with is headline” F. O. E. Of the Forum Dead; Woodcliff Lake Philosopher.” The article’s subtitle, though, reflected his constant, life-long search: “Eggleston, 90, In Turn A Teacher, Doctor, Clergyman, Writer.”FOE Eggleston obituary 1st paragraph

In the obituary, the paper wrote that,

“He was renowned for the lofty style and the finish of his communications, which were generally reminiscent of the Emersonian manner and viewpoint.

“It was a technique which many readers found absorbing. Some said they read F. O. E. before they read the day’s news.”

I’m glad Great Grandfather’s mental wanderings were finally given an appreciative audience. He wrote for the paper for 15 years, up until four months before his death at 90.

He lived those years in a happy household with his daughter and her husband, and his twin grandsons. I wrote briefly about that family nest in the post, I Have Been Talking with the Trees.

Great Grandfather Eggleston died in 1944. Two of his three grandsons were “somewhere in the Pacific,” and would not return until the war with Germany and Japan was over. He had one great grandchild, my oldest brother, one year old, with whom he spent many delightful days.

F.O. Eggleston, Tad&Ted Berryman Woodcliff Lake c1918_CU.rI never met The Old Gentleman, as he was known around town, but I feel that I know him, and for that I am richer.

The End.

 

Left Behind When a Parent Dies

You can see Chapters 1 and 2 of this story here and here.

I wrote a few days ago about typhoid fever’s sad visit to the Eggleston home in 1864.

The Artist Attending the Mourning of a Young Girl circa 1847 by Sir John Everett Millais, Bt 1829-1896Two of the family’s five members died, my great-grandmother, Abigail Hickox Eggleston, and her young daughter, my great-grand aunt, Mary Eggleston.

In that post I did not project myself into the heartbreak that befell the family. It was but a simple account of an event.

Now I’m thinking of the family that was left behind.

How their brand new home felt infinitely empty, the rooms devoid of joy, the air sucked out, the sunlight an intruder on the family’s grief.

I doubt the two boys and one man remaining consoled each other.

Winslow Homer Boys in a Pasture

That branch of my family was nearly purely of English stock, whose stiff upper lips are their heritage, and further steeled by more than 200 years already on the American frontier, a hard life that could not wait for any sorrow to heal.

There was no bereavement leave on a frontier farm, or any farm. Life must go on, starting at dawn and ending well after dark.

Perhaps that was best, for to be outside at work, or at school, was to be otherwise occupied, not thinking about their sorrow.

Boy in Red Jacket.png

Then, upon entering the house at day’s end, that heaviness, that unhealable ache would once again fill their chests.

In the biography that my great-grandfather, Francis Eggleston, the youngest boy, wrote many years later he did not write of the sadness, but it is clearly there, behind his words.

He speculates in his biography about what life would have been like had she lived. “What a change there would have been in our family history,” he allowed himself to wonder from the perspective of 89 years.

In those days a family was a machine that ran household, farm, or store.

Winslow Homer Boy Holding LogsThe children tended livestock, carried wood, raked barns, cleaned house and farmyard; they helped in the garden, the fields, the smokehouse, the spring house, and the kitchen.

The mother lit the fires, cooked, cleaned, boiled water to wash clothes, made soap, kept a kitchen garden with all its hoeing and weeding, sewed clothes, canned for the winter, made jams and apple butter, fed chickens, and helped around the farmyard.

The father did the heavy lifting; he plowed fields, branded and butchered, carpentered, split rails and mended fences, bought and sold land, livestock, and crops, and sometimes had an outside job to make ends meet.

Without any one of those parts, the machine was broken. It wouldn’t work. There was too much to do already, no time or energy to take up someone else’s job duties.

Boy in fieldI don’t know if the family had hired help for the house.

They were well-to-do by farm standards, and would later own what my grandmother called “the mansion on the hill,” a massive Greek revival that exists to this day.

Maybe after the deaths they a hired woman who helped with the meals and cleaning temporarily.

But a farm could not work properly for long without a full-time mother, and so it was the practice to marry soon after a spouse’s death.

This, great-great grandfather Eggleston did, and so Francis and DeWitt were given a new mother, Mary, who was but three years older than their departed sister would have been.

Did the boys accept her readily, or did they resent her presence?

DeWitt, the oldest, was a practical boy, and later a successful businessman. He was 13 when his mother died, and would be off to college in just three years.

Eastman Johnson (American painter, 1824-1906) The Little Convalescent c 1872

Francis, my great-grandfather, was only ten when his mother died. He was a self-described “poetic and romantic boy,” who “bored my elders with problems too old for my years.”

Perhaps, because of his tender heart, my great-grandfather quietly mourned his mother, but cleaved to this new mother for what affection she offered.

Winslow Homer The Whittling Boy

She settled into the family and had two children with the boys’ father, and their marriage lasted more than 50 years before Clinton Eggleston died at 86.

My grandfather also went on to live a long life, dying far from that first home at age 89. Yet in his biography, written in his late ’80s, and even though he was just ten when his mother died, he begins with the typhoid incident on page one.

Clearly his mother’s death left a scar. I’ll never know how deep.

Boy over WallYou can read Chapter 4 of Francis Otto Eggleston’s story here.

A (Reluctant) Farm Boy’s Life in 1865

You can see Chapter 1 of this story here.

FRANCIS EGGLESTON: CHAPTER 2

Francis Otto Eggleston, my great-grandfather, was a medical doctor first, then a Methodist minister, a Unitarian minister, and finally, in his later years, newspaper columnist.

But he didn’t consider himself a Renaissance man. He thought of himself instead as a man who made many poor choices before settling down to do something he loved.

Francis was a poor fit with his environment right from the start.

In his biography he writes that he was born, “in a new house on a farm in Aurora,” an Ohio Aurora map with Eggleston highlighted.GIFvillage founded by his forebears, who walked with their wagons hauled by teams of oxen from Connecticut across the rugged, nearly impenetrable Allegheny mountains and into the wild frontier of New Connecticut, as the Ohio territory was called, in 1807.

There they settled, “25 miles south east of the village of Cleveland,” which was no more than “a biggish village” even as late as 1853, the year he, Francis Eggleston, was born.

From a population of less than 50,000 in 1803, which was about one person per five miles square, the population of Ohio grew to about two million in just the 50 years between when the Eggleston settlers arrived and Francis Eggleston’s birth.

haying-timeSmall towns dotted the landscape, and farms stretched their borders to the edge of wilderness. It was a good time – an exciting time – to be in Ohio, with all its promise as a new state in a new country.

The mid-1800s was a time of great invention for farm machinery, too. In 1830, using the most modern equipment of the day, a farmer could expect to spend about 300 hours to produce 100 bushels of wheat. Just 20 years later, by the time Francis was born, with the invention of reapers, steel plows, thrashing and mowing machines and improved fertilizers, that time would be cut to a third, about 90 hours.

But Clinton Eggleston, Francis’s father, did not go in for modern farm machinery, and it was plenty vexing to Francis.

small_soldiers-of-the-soilI don’t know Clinton’s reasons. Francis wrote simply that his father was “conservative in methods.”

He could well afford what machinery he wanted, as he was a prosperous dairy farmer and sugar producer.

Perhaps one who is conservative in his ways simply has a romantic attachment to the old ways, enjoying a slower, quieter way of life.

Of course, it took a while for the new machinery to become widely used. The machines had to first be manufactured in quantity, and then marketed far and wide, reaching out to these “hinterlands” farmers. So Francis had to wait.

He wryly compares the era of his youth to the age when man first discovered tools, the Neolithic era, writing of his childhood, “That was back in the tool age — when a plow, harrow and one horse cultivator ridden by a boy and guided by a man” did the work.haymaking

The machine came in about the time that kerosene (coal oil then), put the tallow candle out of business, which must have been around 1860.

Ironically, as much as Francis wished he had the advantages of modern machinery as a lad on the farm in 1870, he would change his mind by 1941, wishing for the days of horse and buggy again, because cars go too fast!

Still, you can sense his frustration with farm life when he writes,”We had a farm of something over 200 acres…. “What we did not have was labor saving machines — we always did the hard work the hard way. This did not tend to make boys like the farm.”

He lived the typical farm boy’s life, milking cows, feeding chickens, and guiding the big work horse down field rows while his father drove the plow, which was a good deal of work on a 200+ acre farm.

Though he was a scant 120 pounds and called himself more of “a dreamer” than the kind of boy who would thrive on farm work, he was expected to pull his weight.

'Habitants_with_Sleigh',_oil_painting_by_Cornelius_KrieghoffJust an adolescent, he was sent to split timber into “rails, 12 feet long and perhaps five inches square,” and to put his muscle behind “a great wood pile which was cut by horse-power and drag saw and split and corded by man and boy power.” 

What he did like, though, were the horses. The family “always had three or more horses or some extra colts growing up and sometimes a yoke of oxen.

“I was fond of ‘horse-flesh’ and ‘broke’ one colt to drive before he was a year old. He would pull me on a hand-sled and keep up with a full grown team.

“In summer I rigged up a sulky and drove him until he was full grown.”

In his biography he tells the story of his father’s “gorgeously trimmed” Rockaway canopy-top carriage.Rockaway.3.GIF

The Rockaway was a luxury model carriage, with a fully enclosed cabin, brass carriage lamps, beveled windows, or “glass curtains,” tufted leather seats, and spring axle for a smoother ride. That was quite the ride for a small Ohio farm town!

“I never knew where he got it but it lasted until a pair of colts ran away with it, broke the pole and smashed the top.

“My mother jumped out but one horse had simply landed on top of the other – being scared by a noisy rattling rig for hauling empty barrels – when the pole broke Father had to let them go until someone caught them.

“He sold them then – never drove them again. That was about 1860 as I remember. After this we had a splendid little team of dark brown Morgans – and after this I was not so familiar with the teams, but Father had good horses.”

Morgan stallionFrancis helped produce all the chief products of the farm, which were milk, butter, cheese, and sugar; and to sow, grow, hoe, and harvest the field crops, which were hay and corn to feed the cows, and oats for the horses.

The cows “ran out on pasture in summer, eating grass, and were driven in by a boy and dog morning and eve.”

This was a job he no doubt liked, though, as it gave him time to think on the ideas he read about from his “bedside books” the previous night before falling asleep, and to practice the poetry he memorized so well and quoted throughout his life.

The family’s chief occupation was dairy farming. After milking the cows, the new milk was set in tin pans that held about eight quarts each and were left to set until the cream rose to the top, which took about 24 hours. Then the cream was skimmed off with a perforated tin skimmer and used to make butter, and a small bit used in cooking.

He described the cheese making process:making cheese

“The milk in early time was heated with a steamer and worked dry in a big wooden tub. Later there was a regular cheese vat,” and “cheese was pressed in a hoop by its own weight.

“After the war (1860-64) milk was sold to cheese factories and this made less work for the housewife. Washing milk pans, pails and a churn was work, and called for plenty of hot water.

“When the factory system came in milk was strained into a tin can as large as a barrel and loaded on a wagon that had a route.”

From our perspective in 2014, all this sound like a huge amount of work, doesn’t it? Most of us in America have moved over to the “knowledge economy,” and have turned over raising our food, building our homes, and just about everything physical to others.

That’s just not how it was in the second half of the 19th century, when most of America did not live in cities.

bell-foundry-germanyI began this story saying that Francis Eggleston often found himself in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, or more specifically, the wrong thing for his temperament and interests.

Was being born and raised on a farm one of his experiences of poor fit? He seems to think so, though never says.

“As a boy,” he wrote, “I was said to be lazy. The true fact was that I was always averse to farm drudgery and dirt. I was mechanical, and always had something to make or repair – lazy I was not.”

Francis Eggleston didn’t find his identity in outdoor labor, but in his mind. The next stage of his life would fit him much better. We’ll see that when next we pick up his story in Chapter 3, here.

I’m Lonely for My Missing Ancestors

Sometimes when I’m writing genealogy a veil of loneliness falls over me, like walking through a misty cemetery at dusk.

It’s when I come across an ancestor who left barely any record of having lived. Just a name in the family bible. Or a lone census record that says she did indeed live, in a place, in a certain year.

800px-Henri_Fantin-Latour_-_Dusk_-_Google_Art_Project

Or, as it is with one of my ancestors, there is nothing but a name on a handwritten list of family members who sequentially possessed a family heirloom that eventually came to me.

There is no other sign she existed. No census record, church record, marriage record… nothing. I don’t have her maiden name, only her married one, and so do not even know which line to follow, though I’ve tried the likely ones, to no avail.

It’s then that a sadness comes, not because of my research failure, but because that person’s life left no apparent trace. It’s as if they lived so lightly that their footprints made no impression on the world.

Perhaps some personal record of their life is with another descendant, not me. Or, horribly, perhaps their memories were tossed in the dustbin of history, like Leon Trotsky’s Mensheviks.

I’ve been in second-rate antique stores, the kind that stuff a large bit of everything into a space too small, where in some hard-to-reach corner of the shop there is a cardboard box filled with old studio portraits. Solemn wedding pictures from the 19th century, hand-colored photos of precious children, dignified portraits of a family elder. Who are these people, and why did they end up in this sad place?

vanGogh-Autumn Landscape

For how long were they remembered before an uninterested great-grandson or step-niece tossed their photo in a box and stuffed it into the back of a closet, to be passed down eventually to another generation who couldn’t possibly even dream of taking the time to search out who those people might be?

I have a box like that. For years it actually was a cardboard box. It’s where we kept our family photos when I was a child. When we sold our parents’ house the box came to me, and I hauled it around for years, first to one house, then another, where it would reside in a closet until we moved yet again.

It wasn’t because of dishonor to our ancestors that the photos were closeted in an old cardboard box. It was just because our home was a madhouse. When she was very old, my grandmother took the photos and attempted to organize them into an album. She used glue to stick them onto black paper. Then she turned to the next page, smashing the two previous facing pages together, and the still-wet glue adhered to the photo opposite it. This went on for the entire album.

Later, we tried to peel the photos from the paper, to varying results. The survivors went into another album, the victims into the box. As a child I liked to get out the box and look through the photos. My sister and I would occasionally scribble on the backs of them. Then we’d toss them back in, sideways, upside down, crumpled, whatever.

Now I’m restoring all these photos – to great success, I might add, using a young professional restorer in Romania who has worked magic (leave a note in the comments section if you want her contact info.)

Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_A_Walk_at_Dusk_-_Google_Art_ProjectI have identified nearly all of the ancestors in these photos. But a few still stare hauntingly at me from the box, wanting me to restore their names. Then that sadness comes. I feel nearly like these inanimate objects are lonely. Patently ridiculous, of course, but still….

Is that my fear of mortality? I didn’t think I had that fear. I’ve never thoroughly understood some people’s drive to leave a lasting impression on the world. Shouldn’t that be a byproduct of some objective, not one’s raison d’etre?

I don’t mind the sadness. There’s quiet in it. And empathy. It connects me to the person I’m researching. And it lifts when I finally fill in the blanks of their life, if I’m so lucky.

My husband occasionally tells me I think too much. He says I have a “busy brain.” But he’s never said I feel too much. That’s a good thing.

Your Ancestors’ Memories Live On In You. Now There’s Proof.

My precious niece, a pretty little 18-year old social butterfly, is afraid of crowds.

crowd

Put her in a room that’s well-stocked with people, even strangers, and she’ll be the center of attention. But put her in a crowd where everyone’s passing her in different directions and she may just have a panic attack.

My mother-in-law was afraid of pools of water. She wouldn’t go in a lake. She wouldn’t go on a boat. She wouldn’t go near my swimming pool, and even had to take a deep breath before getting in the spa. I could practically hear her heart pounding.

Now it turns out that their parents, or grandparents, or even great-grandparents may be why.

If your great-grandmother was nearly trampled to death in a crowd, there’s a chance you will fear crowds, even if you never heard great grandma’s harrowing story.DNA

Because scientists think that your ancestor’s memories can actually change your DNA.

That if your great-grandmother was bit by a dog and became mortally afraid of them, you stand a chance of inheriting a fear of dogs from her.

The traumatic event changes their DNA, and then passes that changed DNA to the next generation, then the next. The effect continues until your grandmother’s DNA becomes diluted by the increasing number of descendants, and so disappears.

The idea of ancestral memory – of remembering things that happened to your ancestors — isn’t new, but this is the first time it’s getting the boost of scientific proof.

Of course, like all heritable traits, it doesn’t mean that every offspring will have that genetic memory, just as not every child of brown-eyed parents will have brown eyes. Heritability doesn’t work that way.

I suspect we will find that plenty of other traits are transmitted genetically, besides disease propensity, hair texture, nose shape, fear of water, and the like.

I can’t think of any real phobias of my own. I almost wish I did so I could test the theory. I could ask my mother if she, her parents, or her grandparents were ever, say, bit by a dog or nearly drown in the Blue Hole, which was said to be bottomless.

Then I would learn something about both that ancestor, and myself.

Genetic memory, who knew?

Typhoid Falls on the Eggleston Home

In the summer of 1865 a typhoid epidemic swept small towns throughout America.

Every member of my great-great grandfather Clinton Eggleston’s family in Aurora, Ohio, came down with the fever.Typhoid sign

It’s impossible to tell where it came from, though the highly contagious disease could have been brought by soldiers returning home from the Civil War. A war in which more than twice as many soldiers died of disease than of battle. Diarrhea was their most common killer, followed by typhoid and typhus.

Hospital, Washington DC

The Eggleston home became the family’s personal hospital, with all of them bed-ridden and neighbors sitting vigil and doing what was necessary to keep the family alive. Clinton decided professional medical help was necessary, and hired a male practical nurse to provide what meager care there was available then.

The nurse no doubt applied cold towels to keep fever down, changed sweat-soaked sheets, fed them broth, and did what he could to keep them calm through delirium and pain.

Pale girl

They lived at that time in a new home on a farm in Aurora, Ohio, only a few miles southeast of Cleveland, which was then no more than a large village that had been founded only 40-odd years previous. To the other direction, the house was about a quarter mile from Clinton’s father’s house, where he settled in 1809, building first a log cabin and then a two-story frame house.

The first of my great-great grandfather’s family to perish was Abigail Hickox Eggleston, beloved wife and mother. Seven year old DeWitt and ten year old Frances, my great-grandfather, recovered, but their older sister, Mary, did not, yet lingered a month or more longer than her mother had.

Woman deathbedRecovery for the others was complete, and my great-grandfather suffered no long-lasting ill effects from the disease, other than the tragic loss of mother and sister, who I am sure he mourned for all his life.