Family History

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On Sunday, Pam Schwartz held a zoom meeting with a former museum colleague whose family history she had researched. When Pam begins researching a person’s genealogy she works incredibly fast scouring though millions of online resources to look deep into the family’s past.

Many evenings we sit together on the couch and work on each of our family trees. Back in the 1990s I started researching my tree using the New York public library in New York City to find links to the past. Pam introduced me to online research and I re-worked my research entirely using online documents to verify each fact found. It is possible to find the smallest details of a persons life at the touch of a button.

I lost two relatives recently and their loss renewed a need to piece together moments from their lives. I feel like that is an artists propose to document personal history through sketches and paintings. It is rewarding each time I find that a distant relative left behind a paper trail that has hints about what their life must have been like. Very often they are stories of human resilience and perseverance all of which offer lessons for life today.

Family History in a Cardboard Box

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Pam Schwartz has been assembling her family history for years. Her grandmother, Martha, on her father’s side died in June 2018. Her dad’s sister, Carol had been taking care of Grandma Martha in her final years. I got to experience one Christmas at her grandmother’s home. It was full of tradition, for instance, the men got to sit in the kitchen and eat dinner before the women and children.

Aunt Carol had a large box full of old family photos, documents, and newspaper articles. This was the first time Pam had seen many of the photos. She had never really seen an image of her grandmother as a young beautiful woman. One newspaper article was about couples who had been married for a combined 187 years. Her great-grandparents were the youngsters of the group having just been married for 58 years. Pam took cell phone photos of every photo and document, believing this was her one chance to document this history.

On the plane ride back home she read a long transcript of a court case. It involved an auto accident which killed several of her relatives. Back in 1958, the family was driving home from a party in an Oldsmobile. As they approached a curve in the road a truck was approaching from the opposite way. The truck driver looked down for just a moment. The family car drove off the road onto the shoulder to try and avoid the truck but the the truck slammed into the car on the driver’s side. The car had its roof peeled back by the bed of the truck which was carrying dozens of cartons of eggs. The driver (Pam’s great uncle) and his wife behind him were instantly killed. Pam’s grandmother on the passenger side survived along with her children (Pam’s father and Aunt Carol). Eggs broke all over the roadway. The story is that the family was rushed to the hospital but when they got there, Pam’s father was nowhere to be found. Police returned to the crash site to find the 2 year old boy wedged under a car seat, cold but very much alive. It is hard to imagine a family bouncing back from such a horrific accident.

Aunt Carol decided to give the box of family history documents to Pam, and she is now tasked with sorting through the thousands of new facts and images. That one box of documents is a genealogist’s dream come true.

Visiting Great Aunt Erma Gruhn

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By Pam Schwartz

Since April of 2016 I have lost most of my grandparents generation of
relatives: my Great Uncle Hugo at 88, Grandma Rose at 93, Grandma Martha
at 97, Great Aunt Lucille at 98, and my Great Aunt Gladys at 100. 

 I moved to Florida in January 2016 and since then every time I have gone
home, I have done my best to see each of them. This Thanksgiving and
Christmas I spent as much time with my 99 year old Great Aunt Erma (my
father’s aunt) as I could, (a bout with food
poisoning and bad weather were unhelpful) which amounted to about 7-8
hours over both trips. 

During this time Aunt Erma and I talked about many things and I recorded
our conversation as an oral history. Aunt Erma is the matriarch of my
family and that last tie I have to my Grandparents’ generation. Since my
Grandpa Vernon (her brother) died when I
was 3 and my Grandma Martha never remembered, or didn’t share, many
stories of her childhood, I have learned so much from her about them and
it means so much to me. 

It’s amazing how much time you can spend talking to your family members
and then when they pass you still have so many questions. I asked my
Aunt Erma what it was like growing up with her parents and my grandpa. I
find it sad that I never got to meet my great
grandparents, but Aunt Erma only ever met one of her grandparents as the others passed before she was born. 

 On the Thanksgiving trip we talked about her childhood, my great
grandparents, my grandpa (her brother), Christmas at their house, what
they ate and did for fun, my great grandfather having had a ticket on
the Titanic that he (luckily) gave up, she talked of
my great-great uncle’s suicide just months after my great grandfather
came from Germany to join him here in the US leaving him alone as a 14
year old boy to find his way, and more. 

She even told me stories about my mother’s mom that I
wasn’t expecting since it was from the other side of the family. She
described her, Rosie, as always being so jolly and full of fun. It made
my heart melt to hear it,
because that was the grandma that I had always known. Always a smile,
and a twinkle in her eye. She explained that my Grandma Martha had a bit
of a tougher upbringing and so was harder in a way, but said that you
could always count on her to lend a hand, and
bring lunch and a cake over for any illness, hardship, or holiday. And
that too, was how I knew my Grandma Martha, though Erma provided more
insight into Martha’s childhood then I ever thought I’d know. 

 It is hard to pick which stories to tell as so many were told in those
seemingly fast running hours. Tom came with me over Christmas and did
this sketch as Aunt Erma and I discussed her marriage, a falling out
with my grandparents over the family farm, and
the 1958 car accident which horrifically took my Grandma Martha’s
brother and his wife, badly injuring their two children and my
grandfather. 

As many interviews as I have recorded with my family, you can never
capture all of the memories. If you have older loved ones, don’t wait.
Spend time with them, ask questions, and record or write down what they
say.