Family Ties

It’s been about five years since I stuffed a box of old letters from my mom’s side of the family into my office closet. Seven years before that, I pushed a similarly sealed box of old correspondence (from Dad’s family) onto the same shelf. They did get a dusting when we moved to this new house, but the tape around their lids has remained unbroken.

Until now.

I could never pitch them, but my powers of procrastination and sense of intimidation at their quantity kept me from digging in for a long time. A couple things finally urged me to lift the lid on the past. Since finishing my magnum opus on the tabernacle recently, I’ve been looking for my next writing challenge. On top of that, my husband and I have decided to revert my home office back into a bedroom.

Getting rid of enough furniture to make room for a bed will be the easy part. Clearing out the closet so more of my office “stuff” can find a new home will be more challenging.

My closet overflows with documents. If I open the metal file cabinet hiding inside, hard copies of old writing, research notes, and mementos spew from it like a hairball from a cat. Stacks of file folders form precarious mounds on top of the small dresser we stuck in there, while various paper products and envelopes fill its drawers.

As I pondered where to take the first bite of this elephant of a project, the letters whispered to me from the corrugated boxes on the shelf. Lift our lids and let us breathe again.

Where to begin?

I decided to begin with Mom’s box. First of all, it had fewer letters than Dad’s. Secondly, with all the genealogical research we kids had done, the branches on Mom’s family tree were more heavily laden with unsolved mysteries than Dad’s.

I sliced through the tape and drew out the delicate remains of family correspondence. Organizing the letters into chronological order, laying out what genealogical information we had, and opening my maps to South Dakota for reference, I began to read.

The letters begin in 1928, the year Mom’s eldest sister married and moved from the dusty farm hamlet of Iroquois to the bustling city of Chicago. Sister number two moved out to live with her about five years later, but the other six children, along with Grandma and Grandpa, continued their wedged-together life in a tiny South Dakota farmhouse.

Mom is about ten in 1933, as my grandmother continues writing to her citified daughters. The Depression is in full swing, the Dust Bowl years are in full blow, there’s no work to be had, no money in their pockets, and no crops for my grandfather or any of the other the farmers. Flu and death have devastated many families in the area.

“I sure think that it is time that these hard times change pretty soon ore [sic] the world will all go wrong,” Grandma writes. “This setting around and wating [sic] for a change is the longest there ever was.” To make matters worse, the restaurant owner’s wife has just died. With him closing up shop in defeat, Gram is convinced it’s the last they’ll see of a café in this dying town.

Deciphering my grandmother’s spelling is something of an adventure. But her penciled words, and those of my aunts and mother, draw me into their hard lives and bring them alive once more. Instead of procrastinating now, I can hardly wait to tease open the next fragile message.

How about you? Have any of you started digging into your family history? How did you decide where to begin?