Family History

As part of my mother's 50th birthday extravaganza, I've been secretly putting together a scrapbook for her - "The First 50 Years," I call it. (She doesn't read the blog, as far as I know, so we should be okay talking about it.) It starts with her first baby pictures and will go all the way up through her upcoming party. To close it out, guests at the party will write special messages to her on little records that will be included in the book. I know, I’m sick that way. :)

Anyway, for the last two years since I got this wild idea for a party, I have been harassing friends and family for pictures of her. She had virtually none of her own, so I had to gather them from my grandmother, aunts, high school friends, etc. I've been pleased with the results. I got plenty of shots of her as a child. I've been a scanning fool, nearly wearing the machine out getting all those old black and white shots scanned and reprinted. As a perk, I've burned the pictures to CDs and mailed them to the people with their originals. Her teen years are a little sparse, then it drops off to a few pictures a year for a couple decades. After I was born, there's almost no photos of her that don't have me in them. I guess it became the Smarty Pants Show when I got here. Now it's the Little Sister Show.

It made me wonder if it will ever be (or ever was) the Mom show. She wasn't the kind of child that demanded the spotlight, and as the oldest of four, she took care of others to a fault. My grandmother wasn't inclined to make a fuss about anything, so birthdays and holidays were practically a non-event. (Although it seems that overall we make a huge deal of things now that just weren't that important, then.) I asked my mom when she last had a birthday party - an honest to goodness party. She said she hadn't, ever. I almost cried. Made me more determined to make this party the best it could be.

As a part of this massive undertaking, I've also been building our genealogy online so I can include an accurate family tree. Ancestry.com has a free two week trial that I've been wearing out. While interesting, it’s also depressing as hell. Not everyone had great childhoods, much less great lives. My great-great grandmother died from complications just weeks after giving birth to her fourth child. For whatever reason, the children were divided up amongst the family. While people clamored for the babies, no one wanted the headstrong, angry ten year old (my great-grandmother). She got bounced around like a pinball until she was old enough to marry off.

One thing about this project is that it distills life to the basics. You're born, you grow up, get married, have kids, then you die. Generation after generation. Decade after decade. It’s kind of humbling. Makes me realize the day to day crap I deal with is mostly irrelevant. In a hundred years when my great-great granddaughter is researching me, she won't care about the things I'm angsting over. It also makes you realize that as trivial as people make romance out to be, it’s really the core of everything. You're born because two people came together (hopefully) with love. Then you grow up, fall in love and have children of your own. You can only do your best to raise them well so they do the same. The books we write and read and love are a celebration of it.

Ok, so I’m done rambling. My brain is fried after weeks of working on all this. Have you ever done any genealogy or studied the history of your family? Anything interesting or noteworthy in your family tree? My kin were hiding out in the hills of Kentucky and Indiana, so there's no one famous, but DB's family actually settled the Gadsden area and he's related to Emma Sansom, a confererate heroine in those parts. If I'd actually listen to his uncle who will yak your ear off about this stuff, I'd know more. How about you?

SP

PS. As part of the scrapbooking project, I took my mom for a mini-makeover and forced her into having professional pictures taken for the first time since 1997. She doesn't know why, of course, I had come up with some plausible reason, just the same as I had to make an excuse to steal all her family pictures and not give them back. I had a couple shots professionally framed and will post them at the party. I also put some on her birthday website and I'm putting them in the album. Here's her best shot. I think she looks mahh-velous. I teased her that she looks like a senator's wife or something. The free-spirited child of the 70's in her wasn't amused by this observation. :)