Family Histories

I’ve always wanted to live in a family with a history. I don’t mean to say that my family doesn’t have stories from the past. I have family members that fought in every war this nation has been a part of. I’ve had prisoners of war in the family, slave owners, whiskey makers, explorers to the South Pole and people with very strange names. But my family doesn’t talk about their past. My grandparents don’t talk about their parents or siblings. My parents don’t talk a lot about the family they met. There are so many skeletons in our family’s closets, they’d haunt an entire city.

But this week, I learned about my family. And I learned some really cool things.

My grandfather is up for the week. He, my Dad (who flew down to Texas to help with the drive) and Sally drove up to our house Monday where two of my aunts met them. My aunts and grandfather drove to Milwaukee on Tuesday and the rest of us followed on Wednesday. The purpose of the trip was to bury my grandmother’s ashes and re-bury my aunt who died as an infant next to her near my great-grandparents. So other family members came for the service – my great-aunt Julie (my grandmother’s sister), her two sons Mike and Dan and two of Dan’s sons Rory and Alex. One of my grandfather’s cousins, who lives in Milwaukee, also came with her husband. After the service, we had a luncheon. The next day we toured Milwaukee and then sat down in Aunt Julie’s house for a time of family stories.

Have you ever been on one of those tours where you hang a walkman around your neck, put earphones on and hit numbers in order to listen to a tour guide explain to you a room or object you’re looking at? That is what our tour through Milwaukee was like. We toured the life of my grandparents and parents through the streets of Milwaukee – one cell phone in my grandfather’s car and one in us. Grandpa told us about the many houses he had lived in, the houses his parents had lived in, the houses my great aunt and uncle owned, the college my grandmother went to, the house my dad was born in, and the beautiful Catholic Ballista my grandparents were married in. My aunts and dad added commentary from their memories as kids when they visited there. It was very interesting.

At Aunt Julie’s we sat around the living room looking at old black and white pictures and listening to stories my nearly 92 year old Aunt Julie can remember (and that is a lot!) and the stories her son Dan knows from his growing up years, the papers and things he found on the family farm before the buildings were burned down, and other stories he has heard. It’s a little hard to explain it all, for he is somehow connected to both sides of my family even though he is related by my grandmother’s side. But I heard stories of the carvings my great-grandfather made (he was a stone mason who carved beautiful gravestones). My great-uncle Francis, injured in an accident, enlisted in WWII and did mortuary duty in Washington. My great-great uncle Konstantyn (known as “Uncs”) was a Polish immigrant who enlisted in the American army to fight in WWI, was posted in Alaska, and went with Admiral Perry to the Arctic. Lead feet is hereditary in my family – apparently there was more than one great-aunt or uncle who tore around the roads of Upper Peninsula Michigan at break-neck speed.

Families are interesting things. They have their joys and their sorrows. They have their open celebrations and skeletons. They love one another and hate one another. And somewhere within all those people, there are stories. Wonderful, fascinating stories. Enough to write a book…