Windbreak House

. . .
Looking for Grandmother
A Winter Solstice Message from Linda

Recently I’ve been trying to learn more about the lives of some of my ancestors as part of a new book project. I’ve been frustrated because my writing has been sporadic and not very focused. I’m still searching for the threads that I will follow to create the book.

But writing isn’t all writing, as I’ve said before (see "Thinking Is Writing," my archived Home Page message from October, 2011). An important part of writing is thinking and preparing to write, so I’m able to rationalize my fumbling through the archives of my family’s life, these remnants that constitute my research materials, as part of that process.

Research for writers is different than research for historians who are strictly obligated to facts. A writer may speculate on what those facts mean.

Whether you are writing about your own family or others, if you make a statement that sounds factual about something you don’t know, you are writing fiction. Each writer must decide what that difference means. I am determined to write nonfiction insofar as I am able. But I know that everything I write will be colored by what has happened in my life so far, my opinions, my beliefs. I cannot be objective, so I must try to be as honest as possible about my limitations.

Continued below . . .

Click here for the rest of the Winter Solstice message.
Linda describes how to research the past, particularly your own ancestors, for a writing project. Includes many photos and stories.

Official Documents

The most obvious beginning of a search, and possibly the easiest today, is for official documentation of a life. Many paper files are being put on computers and online, so if you have access to a computer and the internet, searching for public documents has never been easier. Even if you don’t have a computer, start by obtaining official records for births, marriages, and deaths from the appropriate sources. These official records provide you with a framework on which to build and furnish the house of your writing, whether it’s an official history, a more imaginative memoir or fiction based on fact.

Double check everything. My grandmother Cora had told me that my grandfather Elmer was killed in “a logging accident.” She told of taking my mother, aged about 5, to see him laid out in his coffin in a huge empty room, kissing him goodbye. When I started collecting documents, I realized I had no death certificate for him, only a newspaper account of his burial.

So I contacted authorities in Hood River, Oregon, where he was killed in 1914 and quickly received a copy of his death certificate: he’d been beheaded when he fell under a logging train.

Did my grandmother forget that horrid detail? Hold it back to spare his children? Or did some kind person manage to hide the fact from her? I may never know, but that vague “logging accident” is now shockingly real.

Photographs

Frustratingly, many of us find, often after the oldest members are dead, that family photos are not labeled with the information we need. Who are these people? Where did we live then? How old were you? (If you guiltily admit this is the case in your family, start labeling those pictures now! Help your own descendants.)

Look at photos actively: think about what you are seeing. How old are the cars in the picture? Can you see a license plate? Does the background-- the house, vegetation, skyline-- provide any clues? What can clothing and hairstyles tell you?

Consider facial expressions.

My father hated being photographed and any observant person can tell that from the grim set of his lips.

My grandmother Cora always looked straight at the camera; her eyes and mouth are surrounded by smile lines. I’ve never seen a picture of her with makeup. Her clothes are usually comfortable, baggy.

Her sister Pearl was never photographed in casual clothes or without full and elaborate makeup and hair styling; she always smiled coquettishly for the camera.

My mother Mildred used her makeup skillfully and smiles as if she is trying not to smear her lipstick. She looks into the distance, chin lifted, mouth pouty or pursed, like a model. In what is probably the first photo of me, Mildred sits on a concrete step in profile to the camera with her baby balanced on her knees, barely held in place with the tips of her fingers. She looks over her shoulder at the photographer, chin tucked in, smiling in a way I’d call coy. Behind her, the figure of a nurse is barely visible, hovering behind the screen door. Once I saw that photograph, I began to realize something she admitted years later: it was my biological father who wanted a child, not my mother.

You must be prepared to admit that no matter how objective you may try to be when looking at pictures of people you know, your perceptions will be colored by what you know of them. My relationship with my mother was always difficult, so I am trying to become more sympathetic to her by learning more about her, by studying how she became the person I knew.

How can you supplement information in photographs?

When I first saw a picture of my mother wearing belted overalls beside a woman wearing knickers and a gentleman’s flat cap, I couldn’t believe the older woman was her mother Cora. But it is. Mother looks at the camera from under a rakishly-tilted felt hat, her right hand on a large purse at her hip. Grandmother looks away from the camera but she’s smiling. I never saw her wear trousers. In another photo, Mother and her friend Stella are both wearing knickers and flat caps.

Then I pulled out my mother’s journal for May 29 to Aug. 5, 1925, when she was fifteen, and found this note on July 3: “Today Stella and I put on our Middies and knickers and caps and we went downtown about a dozen times before we got started for Belle Fourche.”

Aha! It’s likely the picture was taken that summer and perhaps Grandmother was persuaded to wear the knickers just for the photograph. On the next album page, mother and daughter are picnicking with rest of the family, and I recall mother’s mention that they had driven out to Red Canyon. If I keep reading the journals, I may find a mention of the knickers photo.

Deeper in the album, I see many pictures of mother with girlfriends, posing in various costumes: overalls; baggy dresses and bonnets; flapper dresses. She prances like a model, vamping with a hat tipped over her eyes. She pets a dog and looks soulful. There she stands sideways to the camera, hands on hips, head thrown back, lips pushed out, eyes half-closed: her sultry look. She poses with girl friends, with boys, with Cora.

Several album pages are filled with pictures labeled “George,” “Francis,” “Lawrence,” “Russell,” of boys wearing suits, ties, vests, in front of cars, behind the wheel, leaning against trees, all with one leg slightly advanced, as if they were modeling menswear. The journal mentions Stella’s camera: perhaps this was the first camera available to these teenagers and they were acting out their fantasies.

Ask questions if you can. But consider the responses carefully, whether they are oral or written.

I once asked my mother about a photo in which she was holding a cigarette and a martini glass. She said, “Oh, someone must have put those in my hand as a joke. I didn’t smoke or drink!” A dozen other photos I found later make clear she was quite comfortable with cigarettes and martinis at the time she was married to my biological father. Later, she divorced him and warned me often about his alcoholism.

Even if you can’t question people, question the photographs. Look for recognizable family characteristics: ears, noses, eyes.

Recently I studied a formal, undated portrait of my mother, wearing a high-necked black blouse and flawless makeup. Though the photo is sepia, I could tell her lipstick was richly colored; her eyebrows were plucked to a high arch, her eyelashes curled and blackened (I still have her eyelash curler). Looking closely, I suddenly realized how large my mother’s nose was and compared it to my grandmother’s nose: also sizable. Both women referred to mine as a “snub” nose. Hmm. More pictures; my biological father’s nose was prominent. Then I looked at a photo of the grandfather beheaded by that train, Harry Elmer Baker: his nose is just like mine.

Suddenly this grandfather I never met becomes an ancestor, blood of my blood.

Journals

I’m fortunate to be part of a family of journal-keepers: Besides my own journals (except for those I foolishly burned after a cheating husband read them trying to prove I behaved as he did; don’t ever burn your journals!) I have my father’s and mother’s journals. Simply reading the journals, though, doesn’t provide the answers to the questions I have about my history.

Mother’s childhood diary entries often mentioned going somewhere: the movies, for a ride in someone’s car, to the drugstore, to a neighbor’s. In 1924, age 15, she wrote that Cora gave her fifty cents, her week’s allowance, and “I got my new Jacquette this morning and went down town this afternoon and had a coco cola in Bacon’s all by myself and of course I was waited on by the most efficient of soda squirts.” Suddenly I realized: she lived in town!

Because my grandmother ended her days on the Red Canyon ranch, I’d pictured my mother growing up there. But when Cora met Walt Hey, her second husband, they both lived in Edgemont, SD, where he was apparently a jack of all trades; he had completely rewired the high school, for example, and was an auto mechanic. Newly widowed, she was running a small café with her sister Pearl. The ranch may have been acquired later in payment of a debt. I remember a story about her walking from Edgemont to the ranch, at least ten miles, so she may have lived in town with her two older children-- my mother and mother’s brother-- for awhile after they were married and Walt took over the ranch. Walt and Cora later had two sons, George and Harry, who did grow up on the ranch.

Recently my Uncle George said he moved an old log cabin across the canyon and added it to the existing log house as a kitchen in 1932-- the year after my mother married her first husband. All the older generation, my grandmother, mother and uncle, probably simply assumed we all knew. And I couldn’t have asked “Did you grow up on the ranch?” because I didn’t know the answer.

As I read my mother’s journals, I am made aware of the differences between us. At 15, my mother wrote that her mother Cora asked her if she’d ever been kissed.

I said no and lied like everything but I don’t care. She’d never understand that it is a modern custom, this goodnight Kiss stuff. She preached about B. might lose his control. Lord, whoever thought of it. B’s the very soul of honor and Oh Hell she thinks she’s smart about that losing control. They just do that in stories and probably in married life or something. . . . this serious real life stuff makes me sick. All I want is romance. Kisses are romantic but Oh God help me to leave it there. I want Romance.

I know I occasionally lied to my parents, but I believe that at age 15 I was more interested in horses than Romance-- but I don’t have my own journals to compare with hers so if I write about this aspect I will have to rely on memory. (Did I mention you should never destroy your journals?)

My mother’s later journals are frustrating because she squeezed two tiny lines of script into every ruled line of a journal page. Even with a magnifying glass, I can read only briefly before my eyes cross. Maybe, having lived through the times of scarcity in the Thirties, she was simply conserving paper. I gave her many journals with wide spacing but her handwriting got tinier as she aged. I can trace her mental deterioration, too, by its increasing illegibility and her reminders to herself of things she once knew. Snippets of information she pasted into the journals provide insight: pithy sayings; dozens of obituaries (most are frustratingly undated); photographs of her favorite public men, like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. These later journals are too painful for me to read.

Letters

Some days I’m not sure if learning more about my grandmother is part of the book I’m planning or a distraction from it, so I try not to fret about that. Often when I’m sifting through these mementoes, I see no particular purpose in them for the book in my mind. But I almost can’t help organizing, and I think doing a routine task like sorting letters into chronological order can be a good mental aid to later writing. When I’m stuck on a writing project, unsure how to proceed, I often do some kind of filing or organizing. While my body is busy at the job, I believe my mind might be looking for answers to the questions my writing is asking.

In this case, Cora helped me in this obsessive job because she nearly always dated her letters fully: month, day and year. Sometimes a letter remained in its original envelope. Still, I wasn’t sure what purpose was served by putting them in order. When I mentioned her letters to an uncle, he said, “She never said anything anyway. Oh, maybe what she was doing, but nothing about what was going on in the world.” I disagree; letters provide a personal history unavailable anywhere else. An online search makes it easy to correlate private with world events.

Often it’s not what’s going on in the world that’s important about letters. For example, on December 23, 1945, about a year and a half after her second husband Walt’s death, my grandmother wrote to my mother that she’d dreamed that he drove into the yard. In the dream, he was dressed up; he’d been to town. He came inside and was delighted with her little Christmas tree, erected because his two boys were coming home on leave from military service. Cora had broken her glasses and he immediately started fixing them; she’d written after his death about the pain of seeing several things he’d meant to fix, forever unfinished.

Suddenly I identified with my grandmother in a way I never had before-- as a widow. For years after George died, I’d dream of him coming home, or meeting him somewhere, telling him that we’d thought he was dead. In the dream, of course, his death was just our misunderstanding. Perhaps all widows, and widowers, have such dreams.

Two months after Walt’s death, Cora writes to my mother, “My life seams [sic; Grandmother didn’t have much schooling] so empty and the future looks so dark,” but then “something seams [sic] to brace me up and give me courage to go on just awhile longer.”

Again, I can identify with her; she doesn’t specify what braces her up-- she seldom got to town for church-- but she goes on.

Though grandmother may not have mentioned news events, some are easy to discern from the other things I know about the history of the period. Letters written during the war are on cheap, fragile paper. When she mentions near the end of one that she has to stop writing because she can hardly see, I’m reminded she was writing by lamp or candle light. She refers only obliquely to her sons “over there,” because American censors wanted to keep troop numbers and locations secret.

Again, I’m fortunate. Many of the family letters I have are fully dated: month, day and year. Still, knowledge available to the writer and first reader may be hidden from the later reader. Someone writes: “Cooper died today; I am devastated.” Child? Neighbor? Dog? You’ll need to do more research to find the answer.

Sometimes clues are tantalizing rather than informative. In one letter, my grandmother is apparently responding to my mother’s news that she has broken up with a boyfriend. “I thought you’d get tired of just going with anybody,” says Grandmother tartly.

Had my mother’s quest for “Romance” led her astray? She believed, at least, in the importance of letters. I possess, but have not read, letters written 1925-1930 by the man she married in 1931. In 1938 she married my biological father and in 1952 she married John Hasselstrom. She kept those letters for 76 years, through two more marriage and a dozen moves, until her death in 2001. A story exists there, though I may never write it.

If she and the man had emailed, though, she could not have kept his letters and I wouldn’t know that “romantic” detail.

Technically, letters belong to the writer, so use discretion in quoting from them even if the letter-writer is dead. If you are worried about what is going to be revealed, consult an attorney who specializes in copyright law.

Artifacts

For a writer, the ordinary possessions from a life often becomes detritus, the stuff we throw away without thought. But consider how these things may be valuable aids to memory or even to factual research.

My grandmother wore out most of her possessions. In my poem “Looking for Grandmother,” I wrote that I greet her in my kitchen every day as I use her things but was unable to find her grave plot in the cemetery. When I peel potatoes, for example, I can see her hands deftly slicing peelings into the dishpan (I suddenly remember as I am writing this!) she used to take scraps to the chickens.

(There’s another reason to study and write about these memories: each one may lead you to more. I had forgotten until I found my fingers typing “into the dishpan” that Grandmother’s kitchen was a Hoosier cabinet beside her stove. When I first stayed with her there, she had no running water.)

I use the towels she folded on the shelf above the sink,
gifts from folks who cared for her but didn’t know
what she would need or want. I’m wearing out the frayed
ones first, as she would do. Eighteen years after she died,
I still haven’t had to buy a kitchen towel. Last week
I finished up her last jar of Noxema, finally
old enough to be someone’s grandma; old enough
not to care how I smell in bed. When all her towels
and bars of soap and lotion are gone, I’ll still
be using her bread bowl, her potato peeler worn so thin
it’s nearly wire.

From “Looking for Grandmother,” Dirt Songs, The Backwater Press, 2011, page 69.

What else do I have? A few crocheted doilies, a wooden crochet hook that reminds me how she tried to teach me the art; an embroidered afghan-- she made one for each of her grandchildren but didn’t live long enough to make them for the great-grands.

Every blank page of her recipe book has been covered with recipes handwritten or clipped from newspapers, clues to the household’s prosperity and interests. Liver Sausage; canning beef by the cold method; chow chow and mince meat from green tomatoes. (Our short growing season probably meant they ate more tomatoes green than ripe.) Many kinds of cucumber pickles, beefsteak and oysters, venison mincemeat for pies, suet pudding, Bavarian cream, dandy ice cream, Jelly Roll, mustard and catsup, taffy, cracker jack, peanut brittle and cream puffs.

Household hints include products unused today: “blueing is good for cleaning windows,” and “Always have your lard hard,” and “A teaspoon turpentine added to a pail warm water is good for cleaning purposes.” Ads include one for Carney Coal, which “warms its friends and cools its enemies.” Buckmaster’s Bakery “is not a fakery;” its bread is the best, its rolls meet the test, its donuts are crumptious and its pastries bumptious. Hoosier Kitchen Cabinet promises a systematic kitchen, a pleasant day, “a happy home, a contented wife.”

Here’s a surprise. In the back is a recipe for “malt tonic.” The ingredients are hops, sugar, water and yeast; hmm. Prohibition lasted from 1918 to 1933 and many folks made their own beer, but I’d never have suspected my grandmother was one of them!

And books may hold more than their pages. Tucked between two pages I find a note I wrote to Grandmother on Mother’s Day, 1957.

In my mother’s cookbook I find a list headed "Linda":
Apr 8 1949 . . . 45 1/2 in
Oct. 9 1949 . . . 48 lbs.
Nov. 17, 1954 . . . 82 lbs.
Nov. 11, 1955 . . . 96 lbs. 5 ft 2 in
Febr. 11, 1956 . . . 100 lbs.
Aug 11, 1956 . . . 105 lbs.
(I remember how I was horrified to realize I could never be a professional jockey, since most of them weigh under 100 pounds.)
Oct. 3, 1956 . . . 110 lbs. (Mother 107)

On the day she first realized I outweighed her, she began to lecture me about overeating-- but I was already five inches taller than she. Her obsession with being thin later shortened her life.

Paper documents vary; I could create a day-by-day timeline of the building of my house by reading my returned checks for that summer, seeing when I paid for the floor joists, the shingles, the septic work. Now that few banks return these documents, future historians will have harder work tracing a person’s location, her financial situation, her interests.

Memories

Any writer must acknowledge that memory may be faulty. Write what you recall anyway, in as much detail as possible, because this is personal, intimate evidence. Most of my memories of grandmother were tiny vignettes complete with sight, sound and sometimes taste and smell, true though they lack documentation. What year did that happen? Why was she there? But the taste of a gingersnap cookies dipped in the tea she let me drink (with milk) against my mother’s wishes (“it’ll stunt her growth!”) is part of what she was to me. That’s what’s important.

If I want to know more facts about grandmother, I have to do more research. Most of us fail to ask the right questions when our ancestors are alive; by the time we are old enough to formulate questions, they may have forgotten, died, or, like my mother, decided to deny certain aspects of her history.

Among my significant memories are figures of speech. Grandmother said “My stars!” in situations where my mother swore vehemently. My grandmother called tidying the house “redding up,” a southern or perhaps Scottish expression (see my comments on this topic posted on my Blog Page for November 13, 2011.) My mother once told me a pair of jeans was so worn I might as well “jack up the zipper and run a new pair of pants under it.” I have no idea where that expression may have originated but it’s pithy and memorable.

I don’t yet know how these tidbits might become part of what I write.

* * *

As the Yule approaches, gathering darkness into the longest night of the year, I am grateful to be surrounded by my family, diminished though it is, and our history. The journals, letters and photographs I shuffle from desk to shelf are the evidence of lives lived earnestly, if not always wisely or well. Through the darkness and cold of December and the rest of winter, I will ponder and think and write, knowing that eventually the light will return to the earth. And I know that light will shine on my writing-- and yours as well-- if we steadily apply ourselves.

May your Solstice be warm with family, whether related by blood or chosen. And may you not lose confidence in the coming of the light.

I do believe I’ll try my grandmother’s Dandy Ice Cream recipe for a Solstice treat.


Linda M. Hasselstrom
For the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2011
Windbreak House
Hermosa, South Dakota

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Note:
The "Dandy Ice Cream" recipe may be found in Linda's blog posted on January 3, 2012. Click here to go to the blog page, then search by date or by topic (Ice Cream or Recipe).

These Home Page Essays Are Archived --- Linda posts a new message on her Home Page a number of times each year. We've archived the essays so you can read the ones you missed and re-read the ones you enjoyed. Some of them include recipes or poems or writing suggestions. All of them have photos.

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