I believe there are times in all of our lives when we are struck with serendipitous events. One of those times happened for me when I was working on my family history report. It was a major project in my Texas History class, a class that I loved. I loved all of my history classes. Having been a maid for the past 20 years, cleaning houses for a living in empty houses with no one to converse with, having only small children to interact with at home as a single parent, I was starved for learning by then and the history classes were my favorite.
The serendipitous event was that my mother had suddenly been contacted by a distant family member she’d never known about before. They wanted to share our common family history with her so she visited their home. She said their walls were covered in old pictures and they had chests of memorabilia, pieces of silver that had been saved in the Alamo Scrape on a raft built by our common ancestor, John Klunn McKean.
They had taken care of their family’s heritage with meticulous effort. Our history had been left in boxes, crumbling beneath the New Mexico dust it collected over the decades, dried and baked by the hot winds that rattled the doors and windows of the old rotting shed they’d been tossed into.
These newly discovered distant relatives gave her a very large box of papers full of all sorts of documents and photos. She came by my place on her trip back home and left them with me for that semester. I made copies of everything and returned the originals to her.
I put my copies in a storeroom over twenty years ago and I’ve been looking for them ever since, so that I can better write about this one ancestor in particular. It was her handwritten will that got to me. She is my great-great-great-great-grandmother. (One of them, that is) She’s the only one who left a written record behind that I know of. While it touched me deeply, it made me sad for the rest of my greats…. Who were they? I kept asking myself, as I began to fill out the family tree.
After all, I had 32 gggg-grandmothers. Everyone does. And only one of those left behind a written record that lasted long enough to be found. It was as if their lives were not significant enough to be recorded and I’m certain that their lives must have been exceedingly harsh. I would love to read their words now and see the images of their lives.
Something about reading this woman’s words in her will sunk into my flesh right down to the bone. I connected with her, felt her pain, her compassion, her life. It was a connection I desperately needed at the time.
Who were these brave women living through such treacherous times? I tried to imagine what it was like to have no running water or electricity, to travel by foot or horseback or wagon. I don’t imagine they had disposable feminine pads. Tampons? Are you joking? And what did they use for toilet paper? How do you wash your clothes with no running water or electricity?
All I have is the handwritten will of Maria Clunn McKean. She was the daughter of a captain who fought in the revolutionary war. Maria wrote ballads about him, about her father’s wartime accomplishments. They were published in a little ancestry book. She was one of many people featured in that book.
But what impressed me the most in her writings was the photocopy of her handwritten will. For some reason the image had been reversed and her handwriting was white on a black background. It was written in that swirly old style of writing. She used words in that eloquent, flowery way that early settlers used when they wrote, those who could write.
She was a single mother when she died. According to the book, she had some kind of establishment where she held social teas. In her will she asked her sons to be kind to the slaves. “Remember they have never suffered by my hands.” she wrote. There are some lines in her will that were so poignant that I remember them by heart. That was one of them. There were others. “Fight you not!” she admonished her two sons, John and Joseph. She told them to stick together and told the younger one, Joseph, to listen to his older brother who knew best.
She said she knew that she was dying because she could feel the rot issuing from her body. She died two years after the date of the will. She was 44.
Maria warned her sons not to ever take their father under their roof. She said the alcohol had destroyed him and advised them they should help him but never let him in or he would destroy their lives. She left all her hats to one woman. And paid off a $20 debt.
I still can’t help but wonder about the statement “had never been harmed by my hand.” What did that mean? If not by hers, then whose, if she was a single mother. There was no mention of anyone else in the household. It must have been her husband, before she kicked him out, I can only surmise.
Her sons moved away shortly after her death, according to the records, and it appears they didn’t honor her request. Older brother, John, moved to Texas, which was not yet a state, and younger brother, Joseph, stayed in Tennessee. I suppose the brothers never saw each other again. I will always wonder why they ignored the request.
The older son, my 3g-grandfather, who relocated from Tennessee to Texas, had twelve children in total. Seven by his first wife (from where I came) and then five more by the nanny, who he married shortly after the death of his first wife. I couldn’t help but notice by the dates that the marriage was two weeks after the first wife’s death and something about that made me shudder a little.
Do you know this was 21 years ago when I did this family history report and I’ve just looked on line to discover more information on my great-great-great-grandmother. She passed away at age 32, after giving birth to seven children every two years since the age of 21, having her first child at 21 and her last child at 32, and then of course dying the next year. Let me tell you times were harsh. I believe this was more common than not for early settlers.
She named her first child after Maria, her mother-in-law. All these details you don’t notice until you look at the dates and start doing the calculations, because for these women there were no written records left behind. I’m stunned to think of the life of a woman giving birth this often, in such primitive conditions. This would be my ggg-grandmother. Poor woman certainly didn’t have time in her life to keep a journal.
I’ll never forget how those few pages from a distant relative reached out to me and found me and made the past more real. And it also made me want to so desperately hear from all the other women whose enormous struggles are what brought me here.
Part of what inspires me to keep a journal is realizing the impact it has had on me to read other people’s journals.
My 4g-grandmother’s handwritten will was not the only thing that moved me during my serendipitous time in college. We were assigned many books written by early immigrants and slaves. Nothing moved me more than reading their autobiographies, the heartfelt words, written by those with real experience from the working class, and harsher classes, from eras in life that we can never visit, except in our imaginations.
This is one reason I write about my life experience. Whether or not I should be sharing what I write so publicly is another question. It’s brought me new friends, mentors and inspiration, but also a number of quiet, lurking enemies who surprise me when they suddenly explode.
With the strength of the wings of a butterfly, I rise above them. I share my colorful life and I watch as my sisters and brothers share theirs as well, with no shame and no apology. We are humanity. We are strongest in our broken places, a friend shared recently. I don’t like it, but I tend to agree.
But perhaps first you have to admit you are broken. And a receptacle is only strengthened in the broken places if it’s been repaired in some fashion. We who live most of our lives with a continually broken spirit have little time for that.
I’m fortunate to have been given that extra time, however long. I don’t know how long it is so I don’t want to waste it. You’ve no idea how many death beds I’ve been on, how many times I’ve been told I was about to die.
Each time it happened it sunk in further that all my stories would die with me if they hadn’t been told yet.
This is my time and I’m taking it. My grandmothers and my siblings didn’t get this chance.
The ugly, yet fascinating part of this family history is the fact that Maria was a neighbor and friend to the mother of Andrew Jackson, the craziest and most racist president in history, and Maria’s son, my great-great-great-great-grandfather built boats for him during a war. Then his son was a rebel soldier. The rebel soldier had a son who became a farmer and then they found oil on his land. The farmer, turned business man/community board member, had a son who died young and had no career except managing the money and being a member of local boards. His name was Andrew Jackson McKean. Died of a heart attack at 50.
For some reason, Dad always felt like he had to compete with him. Had to serve on more boards than AJ had, had to accomplish more. He never knew the man but felt deeply competitive with him for the rest of his life.
I believe there are times in everyone’s life that they are struck with serendipitous events. One of those times happened for me when I was working on my family history report. It was a major project in my Texas History class.
I loved all of my history classes. Having been a maid for the past 20 years, cleaning houses for a living, in fairly stark isolation as a struggling, single parent, I was starved for learning by then and the history classes were my favorite.
The serendipitous event was that my mother had suddenly been contacted by a distant family member she’d never known about before. They wanted to share our common family history with her so she visited their home. She said their walls were covered in old pictures and they had chests of memorabilia, pieces of silver that had been saved in the Alamo scrape on a raft built by our common ancestor.
They had taken care of their family’s heritage with meticulous effort. Our history had been left in boxes, crumbling beneath the New Mexico dust it collected over the decades, dried and baked by the hot winds that rattled the doors and windows of the old rotting shed they’d been tossed into. These newly discovered distant relatives gave her a very large box of papers full of all sorts of documents and photos. She came by my place on her trip back home and left them with me for that semester. I made copies of everything and returned the originals to her.
I put my copies in a storeroom over twenty years ago and I’ve been looking for them ever since, so that I can better write about this one ancestor in particular. It was her handwritten will that got to me. She is my great-great-great-great-grandmother. (One of them, that is) She’s the only one who left a written record behind that I know of. While it touched me deeply, it made me sad for the rest of my greats…. Who were they? I kept asking myself, as I began to fill out the family tree.
After all, we all have 32 gggg-grandmothers. And only one of those, in my family history, left behind a written record that lasted long enough to be found. It was as if their lives were not significant enough to be recorded and I’m certain that their lives must have been exceedingly harsh. I would love to read their words now and see the images of their lives.
Something about reading this woman’s words in her handwritten will sunk into my flesh right down to the bone. I connected with her, felt her pain, her compassion, her life. It was a connection I desperately needed at the time.
Who were these brave women living through such treacherous times? I tried to imagine what it was like to have no running water or electricity, to travel by foot or horseback or wagon. I don’t imagine they had disposable feminine pads. Tampons? Are you joking? And what did they use for toilet paper? How do you wash your clothes with no running water or electricity?
All I have is the handwritten will of Maria Clunn McKean. She was the daughter of a captain who fought in the revolutionary war. Maria wrote ballads about him, about her father’s wartime accomplishments. They were published in a little ancestry book. She was one of many people featured in that book.
But what impressed me the most in her writings was the photocopy of her handwritten will. For some reason the image had been reversed and her handwriting was white on a black background. It was written in that swirly old style of writing. She used words in that eloquent, flowery way that early settlers used when they wrote, those who could write.
She was a single mother when she died. According to the book, she had some kind of establishment where she held social teas. In her will she asked her sons to be kind to the slaves. “Remember they have never suffered by my hands.” she wrote. There are some lines in her will that were so poignant that I remember them by heart. That was one of them. There were others. “Fight you not!” she admonished her two sons, John and Joseph. She told them to stick together and told the younger one, Joseph, to listen to his older brother who knew best.
She said she knew that she was dying because she could feel the rot issuing from her body. She died two years after the date of the will. She was 44.
Maria warned her sons not to ever take their father under their roof. She said the alcohol had destroyed him and advised them they should help him but never let him in or he would destroy their lives. She left all her hats to one woman. And paid off a $20 debt.
I still can’t help but wonder about the statement “had never been harmed by my hand.” What did that mean? If not by hers, then whose, if she was a single mother. There was no mention of anyone else in the household. It must have been her husband, before she kicked him out, I can only surmise.
Her sons moved away shortly after her death, according to the records, and it appears they didn’t honor her request. Older brother, John, moved to Texas, which was not yet a state, and younger brother, Joseph, stayed in Tennessee. I suppose the brothers never saw each other again. I will always wonder why they ignored the request.
The older son, my 3g-grandfather, who relocated from Tennessee to Texas, had twelve children in total. Seven by his first wife (from where I came) and then five more by the nanny, who he married shortly after the death of his first wife. I couldn’t help but notice by the dates that the marriage was two weeks after the first wife’s death and something about that made me shudder a little.
Do you know this was 21 years ago when I did this family history report and I’ve just looked on line to discover more information on my great-great-great-grandmother. She passed away at age 32, after giving birth to seven children every two years since the age of 21, having her first child at 21 and her last child at 32, and then of course dying the next year. Let me tell you times were harsh. I believe this was more common than not for early settlers.
She named her first child after Maria, her mother-in-law. All these details you don’t notice until you look at the dates and start doing the calculations, because for these women there were no written records left behind. I’m stunned to think of the life of a woman giving birth this often, in such primitive conditions. This would be my ggg-grandmother. Poor woman certainly didn’t have time in her life to keep a journal.
I’ll never forget how those few pages from a distant relative reached out to me and found me and made the past more real. And it also made me want to so desperately hear from all the other women whose enormous struggles are what brought me here.
Part of what inspires me to keep a journal is realizing the impact it has had on me to read other people’s journals.
My 4g-grandmother’s handwritten will was not the only thing that moved me during my serendipitous time in college. We were assigned many books written by early immigrants and slaves. Nothing moved me more than reading their autobiographies, the heartfelt words, written by those with real experience from the working class, and harsher classes, from eras in life that we can never visit, except in our imaginations.
This is one reason I write about my life experience. Whether or not I should be sharing what I write so publicly is another question. It’s brought me new friends, mentors and inspiration , so I think it’s worth the backlash that it also gets.
With the strength of the wings of a butterfly, I rise above them. I share my colorful life and I watch as my sisters and brothers share their life experiences as well, with no shame and no apology.
We are humanity. We are strongest in our broken places, a friend shared recently. I don’t like it, but I tend to agree.
But perhaps first you have to admit you are broken. And a receptacle is only strengthened in the broken places if it’s been repaired in some fashion. We who live most of our lives with a continually broken spirit have little time for that. I’m fortunate to have been given that extra time, however long. I don’t know how long it is so I don’t want to waste it.
You’ve no idea how many death beds I’ve been on, how many times I’ve been told I’ve got something fatal and that I’m close to death, beginning with a brain aneurysm in 2004 and so many other things since then.
Each time it happened it sunk in further that all my stories would die with me if they hadn’t been told yet. Every time it happens, I am not prepared.
This is my time and I’m taking it. My grandmothers didn’t get this chance. I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to document as much as I have, but have to recognize that a person’s life story will never be finished .. not by them, anyway.
Oikos 