Tonight I am grateful for traveling mercies. My sister Sandy and I arrived in Saint Paul, Minnesota where we have come to reconnect with our aunt and cousin. This is a continuation of our family history “road trip” that began with our participation in the 2013 Chamblee Family Reunion in Gainesville, Georgia over the 4th of July weekend. I have spent the better part of my life asking about where we come from and who are “our people.” It has seemed that the more interested I’ve gotten and the more research I’ve done I have slowly lost all the people who could answer my growing list of questions: my grandfather on my father’s side, my father and all his siblings, my mother and three of her four siblings. I have questions, and those who have the most immediate answers have “crossed over” to the other side, wherever that is. So we are here in Minnesota to begin to ask questions and compare notes with our aunt–the spouse of my Dad’s younger brother–and her daughter, Denise, our first cousin. While we’re here we’ll also get to interact with Denise’s children, our first cousins once-removed. (I get all those first and second cousin relationships all mixed up.)
I am grateful for the connections to family. Someone asked why is it so important to figure out the answers to these questions, and I am challenged to find words to try to convey a concept that I feel in my bones. I need to know. There’s something inside of me that has drawn me toward this deep desire to know who I am not so much as an individual but as part of a collective. I come from a place, I descend from a particular people. They walked in places I can trace on a map but can only imagine their experiences. I have little fragments of their stories–handwritten names in a census book from the 1870s, army enlistment records for World Wars I and II, wills and death certificates–but I want to know them, to tell their stories. But unless I can channel them, their stories will be hard to uncover. I can sometimes feel the ancestors with me–not in a literal way, but in a very gentle, subtle invitation Come, know us, we are here.
I am a romantic, I know. It is actually a quality I like about myself, though it makes me a bit of a dreamer and I have to pull myself down from the clouds from time to time. I am grateful to be taking a part of this journey with on of my “big” sisters. My plan is to actually talk to our oldest sister and all five of my siblings to collect their memories of the stories they heard coming up. I will ask questions of Denise and her mother during our time here in Minnesota. And I will keep comparing notes with the “new” branch of the family tree I discovered a couple of years ago and was able to meet this past year. At the very least our children will all know some of the stories of their grandparents and the family line from which they are descended.
I am grateful to be here and appreciate the unfolding that is happening as I continue to walk this path with the ancestors. I look forward to continuing to explore and learn about the family. As I learn about them, I learn about me. Their story is my story, our story. And I am grateful for it.
