In 2000, I came upon my sixth grade autobiography while helping my mother organize her basement in our family home in Clarence, New York. Clean Sweep wouldn’t have signed up for this job in a million years. There wasn’t enough room for the host, let alone a camera man. However, everything stored away in the chaos seemed to have some importance or worth. It would have been easier to organize if the rooms were just filled with junk.
Hidden in a box next to a pile of fabulous 1950s Vogue Pattern magazines, my sister’s high school art projects, and my grandmother’s bridal ensemble, was a short account of my life enclosed in a graphic construction paper cover. It was simply titled ME.* My class report included the spellbinding story of the first 11 years of my life, a chapter describing my dreamy goals for the future, and a 4 generation pedigree chart. I recall that I wasn’t very interested in writing about myself. I thought stories about 11 year old kids were inherently boring. However, the tales of my ancestors fascinated me.
When I was given this assignment, I asked my grandmother for help with my family history. Mimi was a natural story teller who frequently spoke of our ancestors. Sitting at her lovely kitchen table (which was later to become my dining room table), I sketched out a family tree on a note pad as she explained the connections between the generations. I remember revising it over and over again as the branches ran off the edge of the paper as I tried to understand all the relationships between these people. She brought out her collection of family photographs from the bottom drawer of her slant top desk and carried them into the kitchen for me to examine one by one. She was the family caretaker and as a result, had inherited many relatives’ family treasures. I remember feeling like I was traveling through time. I was transported by the magic of the pictures and her stories. I was hooked.
Years later while sorting through almost 50 years of accumulation in my parents’ basement, I also came upon a folded hand drawn pedigree chart that my mother had created based on my grandmother’s recollections (see a section of the chart above). She too, had interest in genealogy and had recorded the information that my sixth grade report had failed to document. Using this chart as my starting point, I began the exploration for my roots. According to my family, this search now seems to border on obsession. It wasn’t long before I learned that family memories frequently have elements of both truth and error.
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*In 1996 Katherine Hepburn published her autobiography under the same title!
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