Genealogy, they say, is the history of a person’s descent, and I suspect it means more and more to a fellow as he grows old. I know it meant little to me when I was young, and that’s a shame.
I’ll try to explain.
Once a fellow is old, you see, it’s too late to learn much of what’s really important about his family history -- not just when and where his forebears lived, whom they married, how many children they had, what they did for a living, when they died. Those are statistics.
The real story is how they lived – the games they played, what they laughed at, what they cried about, when they were good, when they weren’t, what they celebrated, what they fought about, how they made peace, how they spent their spare time, how they coped with grief, isolation, betrayal, hard times, sinfulness, violent weather, disease and separation.. No one is left to tell.
What brought this to mind was a recent column in the Denver Post. The writer, while visiting the homeland of her ancestors, happened to discover a cousin she didn’t know she had. Somehow this account of a look into the past brought back some memories to me -- guilty memories, in a way, -- of my own, dear maternal grandmother, Annie Maria Stout Steeper, of McLouth, Jefferson County, Kansas.
Now of course I know many things about Annie Steeper. I know she was born in 1864 in Boston, England, to William T. and Sarah Stout and came with the family to the United States in 1871. But I don’t know just why they came to the U.S. in that year, why they came to Kansas, of all places, or why they settled almost immediately on a farm near where a town called McLouth would soon be organized.
I know Annie’s mother died in 1876 of what was then called “consumption,” leaving Annie, the older sister at 12, with much of the responsibility for the care of brothers and sisters. I know her father married a second time, in 1881, and Annie, the very next year, at age 18, married Charles Henry Steeper, who had also come from England and had bought a nearby farm..
I know Charley Steeper, in 1883, moved with Annie and their four children to the new town of McLouth, built a two-story house, got into insurance and joined his father-in-law and a couple of others to form the town bank. I know Charley and Annie Steeper had four children and eventually seven grandchildren, all of whom , at least briefly, lived within one long block of each other..
I know Charley Steeper died in 1916, of leukemia I think, but my grandma lived to be 80, loved and leaned on by three generations. All of which is why I still have a sort of guilty feeling.
: I was born in her house, you see, and lived there for some years. We were close for many, many years, and I have collected lots of statistics about the early times, but I must confess this: I never once sat down, as I should have, and talked with her about important things in her day-by-day life, her family’s life, in those early days. I just didn’t bother.
For instance, what was it like for her, at age seven, to be torn away from friends, from a comfortable home in a historic English town, where her father had been in business and her mother had conducted a school for young ladies, and to be plunked down on a farm in raw, mostly barren northeast Kansas?
What did she think of her family duty, toiling away, starting at age 12, with helping raise her father’s other children? How far away was a doctor? What about schooling? There probably was a one-room country school, with one poorly equipped teacher, but there was no town yet.
How did she get together with Charley Steeper? Were there others?
And what kind of a husband did he turn out to be? I know he was a pillar of the community and a banker and all that, but was he good to his young bride? Did he tell her he loved her? Did he consult with her on important decisions? Did he remember birthdays? Did he allow let her to spend money, real money?
Did he go off with the boys and stay half the night? According to an old news item, before leaving England he had been a reporter for two years for the Western Daily Mercury in Plymouth, and everyone knows how riotous the life of a single young newspaperman can be.
In later life, after and settling down in town, Charley made at least three long railroad trips -- to Colorado, the Pacific coast and England. By himself? Notes that he left don’t indicate Annie was along.
And what about all those one-day train trips to Leavenworth he recorded in his skimpy little business diary? He rode up there in the morning and rode back in the afternoon. What was he doing?
Well, on one particular day, he noted that he had bought two gallons of whiskey. Did he take the booze home – to the home of a very committed member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union? If he did, what did she have to say?
Also, along that line, in later years, how did my grandma get along with the men who married her two daughters -- men from families who were much more friendly toward alcohol, men who, of my certain knowledge, didn’t abide by the law called “Prohibition.”
(In my mother’s family it was commonly known as “temperance,” but there was nothing temperate about it, It was prohibition. It was living as dry as a sun-bleached buffalo bone.}
When I was maybe six or seven, at Sunday School, I was instructed one day to sign a card bearing this “temperance” pledge: “That I may give my best service to home and country, I promise, God helping me, not to use intoxicating liquor in any form.”
I signed it, and I still have that little card, and once, long afterward, my grandma reminded me of it. But by then even she knew it was too late -- way too late..
Being the great lady she was, she always loved me anyway, but I knew I disappointed her. We could have sat down and talked about that.
.