Wisteria

When it comes to my father’s side of the family, I’ve always told people that no one went past the Mason-Dixon line. They were all Southern as Southern can be, mainly in Virginia and Kentucky, especially the Watts family. So it’s somewhat ironic to me that I ended up marrying a man from the North and eventually settling there to raise my family. The Watts family originated in Halifax County, Virginia and there was mention of the surname as far back as the formation of the county in 1752. And that’s basically where I’m stuck on that particular line. I traced all the Wattses in that county back to one progenitor, Samuel Watts, who first bought land there in 1775. I speculate from tax records that he was born about 1738. I descend from his eldest son Thomas M. Watts who was born about 1765. I know nothing of Samuel’s origins, other than he might be English. Of course that far back, he had to come from somewhere unless he was Native American, which does not appear to be the ...

BadIndians: a Tribal Memoir 2013 by Deborah A. Miranda Paperback, 6 x 9, 240 pagesISBN: 978-1-59714-201-4 Author Deborah Miranda writes in the introduction to this book: “Human beings have no other way of knowing that we exist, or what we have survived, except through the vehicle of story.” She also states, “My ancestors, collectively, are the story-bridge that allows me to be here. I am honored to be one of the bridges back to them, to their words and experiences.” I love how Deborah Miranda has taken all the pieces she has of her family history and woven them together in this story. Using old government documents, BIA forms, field notes, diaries of explorers and priests, photographs, family stories and genealogy work her mother had done, she created a beautiful tribute to her ancestors and allowed their voices to be heard along with her own voice in the form of poems and commentary that are insightful and moving. It’s not always pretty and some parts may be distu...

"...of all the nostalgias that haunt the human heart, the greatest of them all is an everlasting longing to bring what is youngest home to what is oldest."                                                               ---Laurens van der Post

I wrote so much about the encounter with a group of old photo albums in my last post that I didn’t have time to discuss the photo project I started working on. In light of how those old photo albums were treated, I took another look at more recent family photo artifacts. My children’s paternal great-grandmother passed away in 2001. Like with my grandparents, during visits I would often sit with Granny Westfall and go through her photo albums and quiz her about family history. After her death, one of her sons lent me her albums to go through. There’s about six or seven old “magnetic” photo albums that are filled with snapshots and other photographs mostly of her children and their children. She had ten children altogether and most of them went on to rear families so she had a lot of descendants. I was touched to see in one album where she carefully added the first photograph of my oldest child along with the birth announcement I sent to her. In a few places, some photos had a...

Are you a stranger without even a name, Enclosed and forgotten behind the glass frame, In an old photograph, torn and battered and stained And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame? -- Eric Bogie Once when I was a child, I laid down my mother’s long wardrobe mirror on the floor and stared into it to find another world. The ceiling was the floor in this world and everything was a mirror image of reality. I so wanted to step into that world and explore the odd dimensions of it. To me, old photographs are also like staring into another world, they are a window to the past. I’ve written before about old photographs and my work with them. They played a prominent role early on in my family history quest. I would sit down with a box of old photographs and quiz my grandfather on each of the images. He was in his 90s at the time. I remember showing one photograph of a gentleman and his family to my grandfather and having him lean in close and whispered, “He was a bastard.”...

I have a dilemma. I don’t have time to keep this blog fresh. It’s dear to my heart, though, and I don’t want to abandon it forever. It’s just that life is so daily right now and I have to reserve time for the living. I anticipate that I won’t always be this busy, but for the foreseeable future, probably. My children are in their late teens/early adult years and well, that takes up a lot of my time. I can see myself working on getting them launched for the next 5+ years. Add to that a somewhat demanding day job and other outside obligations and here I am posting some five months after my last one. But sometimes I still have some great ideas for blog posts. And I’m always one binder away from delving into the pastime of family history. It’s just that my time for such things does not stretch for days on end as it once did. Instead I can only snatch minutes here and there, sometimes longer stretches, but the time in between when I can’t fit it in at all can turn into a span ...