All In the Family

It is a well-worn truism that blood is thicker than water.  Family ties and roots have always been important to me even through all my years of living in Colorado.  My friends knew a lot about my family because I talked about relatives often.  Occasionally, I went back to Alabama and Georgia to visit them and once, when I graduated from the University of Colorado, one of my brothers came to Boulder and attended the graduation exercises.

For all that it wasn’t until I moved back to Birmingham that I realized just how quick and close my family ties were and how there was still room to grow closer.  As I have related elsewhere, much had happened during my thirty-plus years away.  Three of my siblings had become parents themselves.  Other relatives were now grandparents, great-grandparents, and in two cases great-great-grandparents.  I was meeting not just familiar cousins, but also cousins I had never really known.  Then there were cousins who were removed by different degrees.  That was particularly true on my mother’s side of the family.

Time has brought forth new relatives, matured more, and taken away others.  Only one of my uncles is still alive, 98 year old Uncle Vincent.  Aunt Doris will turn 93 this year.  Both of them are sadly suffering from dementia and no longer recognize or remember many family members.  My long absence had blotted any memories they had of me from their minds, and when we got the two of them together recently they didn’t know each other.

Then there is the sad case of Aunt Juanita.  I got out to the nursing home she stays in last week to see her at last.  She has been there for a few years, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw even though I had been warned about what to expect.  The place she stays in is well managed and clean with a competent staff.  But Aunt Juanita herself is in very bad shape.

She turned 88 on Sunday and I, along with a couple of cousins and Aunt Doris, went by to wish her a happy birthday.  The woman I saw wasting away in a bed was not the one I remember seeing some years ago.  She was completely unaware of our presence; did not even look at any of us but only stared at the ceiling.  She is alive, but is certainly no longer living.  She is malingering, with no joy of life left, no reasons to take an interest in anything even her own well-being.

As bad as Aunt Doris’ dementia is, at least she’s physically active and alert even though not in complete possession of her faculties.  The same can be said of Uncle Vincent and I had to wonder if the fact that both are still living in their own homes was a determining factor in their cases.  When I told my mother of Aunt Juanita’s condition, she said that she did not want to leave her own home of forty years unless there was absolutely no other way of caring for her.  I want to comply with that wish.

But it hasn’t all been sad news.  I am reconnecting with a lot of kinfolk now and I am taking advantage of technology to add more meaning to our meetings.  Right before I left Colorado, a friend gave me a digital pocket camera as a parting gift and I have been using it a great deal since my return.  Every time I get together with family, the camera comes out and pictures are taken.  I have decided to create a photo album of my relatives so that my nieces and nephews in particular can know who their kin are.

So the camera was busy last week during visits to cousins north of Birmingham I couldn’t ever remember seeing before.  They, on the other hand, remembered me as an infant and toddler.  In working things out I realized these people are my second cousins.  Our grandmothers were sisters and while I have clear and vivid memories of my grandmother, my cousins could not say the same of theirs.  When we got together, we talked some about our great-grandparents.  It turns out none of us knew much, but what little we talked about was all new information for Yours Truly.

When one of these cousins dropped by for a visit a few days ago, I introduced my niece to her saying, “This is Wanda, who is your second cousin once-removed.”  While I know those words meant nothing to my niece, what I wanted her to understand more than anything else was that our family is extensive, that there are third and even fourth cousins in the family tree and we will do well to get to know them.

In keeping with that need, I’m making plans to spend time with these relatives.  One of them loves to cook and I promised that I would return soon so we could make some delicious meals together.  This cousin is also a grandfather making his descendants second cousins once- and twice-removed.  I’ve yet to meet them but I am hopeful I will do so before too long.  I was also told of more family living in the cities of Warrior and Jasper, both also north of Birmingham, whom I should make every effort to see.

As for my father’s family, it was much larger than my mother’s and I’ve yet to see all of my first cousins who still live in Birmingham.  I ran into two of them while walking around the neighborhood, cousins who are now in their seventies and have gray and white hair.  One of them, upon seeing me, broke into a big smile and when we talked recalled that the last time we had really spoken to each other had been way back in 1969.  The other, his brother, said he hadn’t spoken to me since I had moved to Colorado back in 1981.  The camera came out, and the appropriate photos were taken.

My mother’s sister is here on a month-long visit and I’m learning a great deal from her.  I’m trying to find out more about my maternal grandfather who died in 1973.  His name was Henry Hall and he was a very secretive man who told me nothing of his own immediate family and said very little to others about them.  He had fought in World War I but he never discussed his experiences in the trenches in France with me.  And it was only during a talk among family members last week that I learned he had been wounded in action.  Had that happened today he would have been decorated.  But back then, nearly one hundred years past, the achievements, sacrifices and bravery of black American soldiers was routinely ignored. 

I often wondered how, after seeing and experiencing all he had in Europe, Henry could have returned to the Jim Crow South and put up with its deep-seated racism.  When I raised that question, nobody could give a satisfactory answer.  And as to tracking down Henry’s other family members, that is going to be a very difficult task.  Nobody knows who they were and what children they had.  Despite the lack of information, I’ve been told that there are resources which might be able to help in the search for these missing branches of the family tree.

My return to the South has made me aware of the rich family heritage I have.  The stories I’ve been hearing have only whetted my appetite to learn more and it will be interesting to see what I will eventually learn.  At the same time, I also realize that my experience along this line is hardly unusual.  There are few families that don’t have missing pages and big gaps in their histories.  People seem to shy away from the subject and much that should be remembered gets lost as an older generation passes away without leaving any records behind.

I don’t want that to happen in my family.  The newest generation should know something more about us than a list of names—if they even know that.  I want to start with still photographs, but will eventually add video recordings so that these people will come to life for my nieces and nephews as well as any children they may have in the future.

It is ironic that it took a reluctant return to Alabama to realize this.  But now that I have, I want to do as good a job as possible.  That is why in addition to photographs and video recordings, I plan to keep journals written in my own hand to hand down to the newest generation as well.  That will be one way of keeping this “all in the family” and I want to recommend to others that they think about doing likewise.