Stuff Ancestors Say
Last week, in the days before Thanksgiving, I packed up my stuff and took an express train from Chicago to St. Louis. In addition to my clothes and toiletries, I brought my laptop, my iPad, several books, a knitting project, a cross-stitch project, and the notebook that incubates my fledgling novel. It was, admittedly, a lot of stuff to tote across the state of Illinois. Particularly considering this was a trip to visit a big chunk of my family and, you know, spend time with them. But I know from experience that these family visits have a way of including long periods of sitting, resting, downtime, and napping, and I’m not much of a napper. I wanted to make sure that when quiet time came, I was prepared to take advantage of it (bonus points if I could do so in a way that couldn’t be classified as “working”).
If I’d had any clue what I’d actually be spending spare moments of this past weekend doing, I’d have left it all behind. I spent most the quiet hours of the past weekend reading page after yellowed page of Flaxbart Family Arcana. But I couldn’t have known beforehand that I’d be doing so, because I hadn’t known that any of this stuff existed.
Aunt Linda casually asked Uncle Dan if he had a copy of “dad’s autobiography,” and my ears pricked up. Uncle Dan disappeared into a filing cabinet somewhere, and returned with a pair of manila envelopes and a binder made of heavy, brown cardstock. He placed it in my hands, to browse at my leisure. And my leisure schedule, previously spoken for by a litany of arts, crafts, and romance novel eBooks, suddenly cleared right up.
One of the manila envelopes held a stapled, word-processor-typed treatise called “Flachsbart/Flaxbart Family History, Part III: Addendum B.”1 This exactingly titled document had been written by my paternal grandfather, Robert Flaxbart (“Grandpa Bob” to me and my cousins) in 1990, not terribly long before his death, but before said death was on the horizon. Grandpa Bob had been bitten by the family history/autobiography bug more than once in his life. In beautifully German fashion (and perfectly prescient fashion, too, as it was exactly what I wanted to know), Grandpa began this Addendum by enumerating what had come before it. “Part I” was his grandfather Hermann Flachsbart’s autobiography, completed in 1888 and translated from German by his eldest son. “Part II” was Bob’s attempt at recreating the life and times of his father’s generation. “Part III” was Bob’s own autobiography, written ten years prior when he was 65. There was a transcript of an interview my Uncle Dan did with his grandmother (Addendum A) and this Addendum would be his account of what had happened in the years 1985-1989.
Once I knew what I was looking at, I stopped reading Addendum B and jumped back to the beginning. I cracked into the brown binder. This was (Great-Great) Grandpa Hermann’s autobiography. His was the generation when this branch of my family came to America from Hanover, and his account spanned some 50 years of his life, divided into nine or ten “chapters.” I ate up the first few chapters, which covered his tumultuous childhood in Germany. Unlike a diary, recounted when the experiences are fresh, these recollections were written through the lens of a 50 year old man, a man who’d seen many people die before their time, who’d spent the bulk of his life an ocean away from his beloved mother and sole surviving brother. If he’d written any part of the autobiography before his first visit to a certain Lutheran church near Alton, Illinois, he might not have felt it necessary to detail his boyhood prayer habits. But, by the time he picked up his pen, he’d spent decades as a Lutheran minister, and so that was the Hermann who told Hermann Flachsbart’s story.
Uncle Dan didn’t uncover copies of Parts II and III of the Family History2, so I jumped ahead a hundred years to finish Addendum B. Here I read about the only part of my grandfather’s life that I had been alive to see; it was a bit like unearthing an extra-long Christmas letter. Each grandchild warranted an individual mention; mine said that my mother had told him I was 6 “going on 16.” It was sweet reading how much he was enjoying those years, and bittersweet to hear him planning for a future I knew he wouldn’t live to see. I was eight years old when he died, and my memories of him are all as grandfatherly as those sentiments from 1990.
There was still that other manila envelope. This was the one that showed me something of my grandfather that was new to me. He’d titled it, provocatively, “A Rebel in the Church?” I’d known a bit about Grandpa Bob’s role in the parish where my dad and his siblings had grown up (the same church where my mother’s mother had directed the choir, and which the rest of my mother’s family attended, shall we say, sporadically). But here was a treatise on his life’s commitment to the Lutheran Church, interwoven with pristine and delightful color commentary about his boyhood in 1910s and ‘20s St. Louis, his time serving as an officer in the Air Force in World War II, his move to Albuquerque after the war. He wrote with a dry sense of humor about the many changes he’d witnessed in the Lutheran church he’d committed his life too — some welcome, some painful. He described the joys and tribulations of church leadership. Like him, I find myself deeply involved in such matters. It felt almost as if he was offering me direct advice from out of the past.
Had this been the end of my reading, I’d have returned to Chicago, and soon LA, with more newfound knowledge of my ancestors than I’d ever hoped to possess. But Uncle Dan had more folders in that cabinet, and when he saw me take a shine to this work, he seized the moment. Back again to the archives, and this time the folder was full of details about his mother’s side of the family, the Kuhlmanns. Perhaps I should have been tired of this. But I’d intended to spend this Thanksgiving with my relatives; who said they had to be living relatives?
There were more family trees here, but I’d seen all that before. More appealing to me was a brief and breezy recounting of the family’s history by my grandmother’s youngest sister, Mildred (“Mil”). She described where people had lived and worked, where they’d went to school, why they’d moved away from home. She wrote about my Grandma Ruth’s early jobs, saying that as the eldest, she was most called upon to work to support the family; she’d taken a full time job after completing two years at Washington University, one on scholarship, one paid for by a job in fabrics. I never knew all that. Or if I had, it hadn’t stuck.
My Grandma Ruth died the year before I was born. My closest ties to her have always been through her recipes, which Aunt Linda typed and bound into a blue cookbook that I’ve spent hours poring over. The recipes are great and all, but I think I was mostly just searching for her in those pages. When my dad and his siblings get together, their mom’s memory is often invoked, but these memories are distant, shaded with sadness (as she died rather young and following a very difficult and protracted illness). What’s more, from my perspective, the reminiscences hold no context. Until this weekend, the only version of Grandma Ruth I knew was second-hand. But I was about to close out this ancestral communion with a first-hand account from the woman herself.
All of my grandmothers3 were raised in St. Louis and taught to cultivate a beautiful, even, cursive handwriting. I know this now, because included in the folder labeled “Kuhlmann” was a handwritten, 20-page letter from Grandma Ruth to her mother and sister, written in 1964. I also know that this grandma dotted her i’s with little circles. Correspondence before email was complicated: after a brief apology for its excessive length, the letter opens with instructions to forward it on to the next relative on the list after reading, before finally returning it to her. The letter was written over a period of weeks while she was recuperating from a truly gruesome accident that required a lengthy hospital stay and put her in a wheelchair for a while as she recuperated at home. I’d heard about the accident before, but I’d never had the context. Now, here it was. In the form of a first-hand account.
Unlike the rest of my historical reading, this letter didn’t generalize about a span of time. It was all about the minutia. While the details of her accident and recuperation were emotionally affecting (and sometimes riveting, and sometimes kind of gross), I was even more fascinated by the details of her daily life at this time, which she’ll go on about for two pages before getting back to “our tale”. She describes the thrill of getting an electric dryer installed, but imagines that once her cast is off, she’ll go back to hanging laundry on the line so she can enjoy the fresh air. She thinks her daughter has too much homework. Her husband has a Kiwanis meeting, and they pick up some “taquitos” for dinner (she goes on to explain to her mother and sister what taquitos are). It’s my grandmother’s 1960s Mrs. Dalloway, and I may be biased, but I think it’s kind of a masterpiece.
While everyone else in the documents my uncle had handed me was writing for posterity, Grandma Ruth was writing to pass the time, and to get the details of her ordeal down straight. And in fact, all of these histories and autobiographies and addenda spoke to me most clearly in the details. When the writers were telling specific stories, about specific events, it was as if they sat beside me. It behooves me to note the staggering faith of each of these writer-ancestors. To a one, they come away from each disaster in open awe of God’s glory, immensely grateful to be alive. I’m not sure what to make of this particular theme of the writings, written across many decades. But it’s not nothing.
And the stories! Here’s a selection:
⁃Great-Great Grandpa Hermann, in fever-induced delirium, nearly jumped out a second-story window the night before his wedding.
⁃In Great Aunt Mil’s history of her branch of the Kuhlmann family, she opens a paragraph by detailing which St. Louis high schools her siblings attended, then casually diverts for a sentence or two to describe a tornado that blew “three walls of our house” and much of their furniture away.
⁃Grandpa Bob recounts his “most memorable” Easter service, which happened during his time in the Pacific Theater toward the end of World War II. A plane — one of his Air Force squadron’s planes — came apart at the seams while essentially crashing into the service.
⁃Grandma Ruth spent 7 hours over two days typing a high school term paper for her husband’s boss’s daughter, because the boss’s secretary had been typing too slow. (This was in the week before her injury; in the weeks after the accident, the same boss’s wife brought over a massive chicken dinner. I should think so!)
I know these stories now, and many more. I can tell them to the rest of the family, and to my own children and grandchildren. But if this bout of reading has taught me anything, it’s that the best way to hear a story is first-hand. I have already demanded that the aunts and uncles present get to work on their autobiographies. They cried forgetfulness, but I think the secret might be to get them in a room together. No sooner had they told me they don’t recall much of their childhoods than they started reminiscing about cross-country road trips and the way the galley door in the family kitchen was always swinging back and forth. And for some reason, desperately, I want my grandchildren to know about that door.
I think this is right; I don’t have the documents in my possession at the time of writing, so I can’t fact check. Not one of you likely cares if I’ve gotten it precisely right, but what can I say: I feel that Grandpa Bob would want me to be precise here.
though I do think they’re extant, don’t fret
Ruth, my maternal grandmother Carol, and my dad’s stepmother, Lois, who married Bob after Ruth died, and who was Carol’s childhood best friend, and my mother’s godmother…honestly, we don’t have time for all this but trust me, it’s a good story.
Lois' firstborn trusts you!