On With Your Story

It’s Mother’s Day.  “This I Believe” is featuring essays about mothers today. I just read one about how a girl should know her mother by a women who lost hers young.  Perhaps you heard authors read their “This I Believe” essays on National Public Radio.  The radio series ended but the program continues online.

Why not write an essay of our own today, or any other day for that matter.  As Edward R. Murrow said when he introduced the original radio series in the 1950s, “Never has the need for personal philosophies of this kind been so urgent.” You can keep it for your family or submit it for publication online. You can find essay-writing guidelines and instructions for submitting at http://thisibelieve.org/guidelines/

Last year’s Mother’s Day post.

Have you been watching the TV series, Who Do You Think You Are. I have and I’ve been struck by the almost universal response to the discovery of a family connection. When Spike Lee discovers an ancestor who worked as a slave in a Confederate pistol factory, he wonders what the man may have thought about the situation. When Sarah Jessica Parker finds an ancestor who left his family for the 1849 California gold rush and died shortly after arriving, she wonders what he must have thought about the collision of his dreams with reality. The discoveries bring mysteries that intrigue and questions that can’t be answered.

We have a mystery in our family tree, too. My husband’s father seldom spoke about his own father and mother. He spoke of an uncle affectionately, but on his mother and father he was largely silent. In searching Ancestry.com, I came across some facts that when put together provoke more questions than they answer. Fact one: My husband’s father  (we will call him John A.) was born in 1916.  Fact two: In the 1920 census, his father (we will call him John L) was living with a wife whom we will call Lucille. No other person was listed as part of the household. Fact three: In the 1930 census, John L was listed as living with a wife, whom we will call Marilyn. Also part of the household in 1930 was a 14 year old son, John A.  The questions begin: Where was 4-year old John A in 1920? How did he happen to appear in 1930? Is he Lucille’s child or Marilyn’s? What happened to John L.’s first marriage?  What was John A’s experience during those years? The facts provoke certain speculations, but we will never know the truth because the family tree can’t talk, and John A and John L took the truth to their graves. They didn’t keep journals, write memoirs or personal histories, or even tell family stories. How would I handle this mystery in a family history book?  I’ll address that next time . . . .

Copper miners at Rio Tinto, Nevada, 1941

I rediscovered this intriguing site for old photos today. If you are interested in photos from the 1850s to the 1950s, check out the online archive at Shorpy. You can view pics and post your own. I joined and posted a family pic of men milling around the copper mine in Rio Tinto, Nevada. One of the men is my grandfather who worked at the mine in 1941 and 1942.  Rio Tinto is a ghost town now, as this photo of the ruins of Rio Tinto school house shows.

Once thriving mining town of Rio Tinto, NV, was abandoned in 1948.

The site is named for Shorpy Higgenbotham, a teenage coal miner in the early 1900s. You can see some grim and poignant photos of him at work.

My wedding anniversary is today. On this day in the year I married, the song “Shadow Dancing” by Andy Gibb was the No. 1 song, according to Billboard magazine. How do I know this? I looked it up on the Internet, of course. On the website, THE #1 SONG ON THIS DATE IN HISTORY, you can look up the top song for any date going back to the 1890s. Links for listening are provided as well for songs that date back to the 1940s. What song was popular on the day you married or on the day your parents married? Look it up and let me know.

If you want to hear and see Andy Gibb sing “Shadow Dancing,” try this video from YouTube:

“What has rapidly become one of the hottest events in town… The Moth is an evening of unashamedly old-fashioned storytelling… The performances are enthralling, funny and moving, with a typical New York intensity.” -The Times (London). You can listen to well-told personal stories here and subscribe to podcasts.

The Genealogue is treasury of off-beat news about births, deaths, marriages, and other genealogy-related tidbits. This quirky and diverting blog is brought to us by Chris Dunham, a self-described “unprofessional genealogist.” I’m following him on Twitter now.  When you visit, check out the link to the Genealogy Blog Finder which tracks, the last time I checked, 1,365 genealogy blogs. This is a serious resource for genealogy buffs.

StoryCorps is a non-profit organization that honors and celebrates our lives by recording, saving, and sharing our stories. Listen in. Then if you want to share and save the story of someone you care about, you can find out how to do it.

What is your favorite StoryCorps story?