**This post was originally written in the summer of 2015.
My mom is the story-keeper for her family. For most of her life, she listened to the
stories her family members told her, absorbing the history. For most of her adult life, she has spent
hour upon hour researching her genealogy, even finding and visiting current
relatives still living in Ireland and Holland.
I can remember her doing all these things, yet growing up I did not have
the same fascination with my family history.
You can imagine the eye rolls of a kid as once again I heard that story
about Uncle So-and-So. Maybe it is
because I didn’t have to search for myself – these stories were handed to me
time and time again. This year, my
mother turned 70. My brother, sister,
dad and I discussed what we should get my mother for her present this
year. Getting her a “thing” didn’t seem
to be special enough. My brother
suggested we give her an “experience.”
We decided to take her to her hometown, Pittsburgh, and have her give us
a tour of all of those family sites that she has told us about all of our
lives. Needless to say, my mother was
thrilled. She had been preparing for
this her whole life.
For some reason, we decided that our trip would only be my
parents and my siblings – no spouses, no grandchildren. It was a throwback to our family vacations
across country with three kids crammed in the back of a just-slightly-too-small
car. This time, however, we used my
sister’s van – the lap of luxury compared to our childhood vacations. With my sister adroitly in the driver’s seat,
we started off. My mother had brought
along bags and boxes of pictures and letters, which she organized according to
our itinerary. My mother had put
considerable effort into planning this trip, contacting various relatives and
strangers, to see if we were able to see certain houses and to make sure that
we were not thought trespassers.
Unlike my childhood annoyance, I have grown to love the
stories. Frankly, they get better as Mom
gets older. We sat with rapt attention in
the van as we approached the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Before we stopped, Mom had presented the
pictures and stories of her maternal grandparents’ families. First, we stopped to see the Kramer house
with Kramers still living in it. The
house now has its sixth generation living in the same brick Federal-style
farmhouse. Then, we traveled a couple of
hills over to see the old Tennyson house, same brick Federal-style, that we
have seen for our whole lives in a picture, taken in 1908, of the Tennyson
household that hangs in our parents’ house.
Next, we traveled to Slovan, the tiny mining burg where our grandmother
lived as a small child. It’s the town
where the Russian Mafia is said to have blown up the house of Uncle Hen (the
town Justice of the Peace) during Prohibition.
We stopped in the beautiful little town of MacDonald, where Grandma
spent most of her childhood and found her favorite sledding hill (which looks
neckbreakingly dangerous even in a car – Pennsylvania hills!). Then, we saw the remote farm where my grandma
lived unhappily her senior year of high school.
On day two, we tackled Pittsburgh itself to see Mom’s
paternal sites. Starting on the height
of the town, Troy Hill, we saw the gravestone for our great-great-grandparents
Weckesser, who came from Germany and lived meagerly as a tailor and family. We saw the picture and the spot of the saloon
where their daughter, our great-grandmother, Christiana Weckesser, worked and
met our great-grandfather Adams, who would stay there while on business. Descending Troy Hill, we then re-ascended to
Veteran’s Street, where our grandfather, Robert Adams, was born and later died
from cancer as a young father, but also the place where my mother spent much
time visiting her grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins. This was the saddest part of the trip for my
mother. The house was no longer
there. It was just overgrown vegetation
going down the slope between two other old houses. But as my mom showed us the pictures from across
the street (because that’s where they took all the pictures, since it was the
sunny side), we imagined all of these people laughing and enjoying life, kids
running down the hill to meet their father as he walked back up the hill from
work. From Veteran’s Street, the final
stop that day was Westview to see the house where my mom spent her early
childhood, after her father died. A
neighbor was smoking on his front porch and my mom asked him some questions
about who was living in certain houses; he directed her to ask Mary at the end
of the street – she would know everything.
Mary happened to be my mom’s cousin and still lived in the house where
she grew up with her parents, my mother’s aunt and uncle. Mom hadn’t known she was still living there,
so we went for a visit. Mary is retired
and lives alone (but with a baseball bat placed near the front door). She graciously welcomed us in and she and Mom
reminisced. We then visited our
grandfather and great grandparents’ graves.
Mom showed us how looking straight across the ravine and toward the
other hill, we could see that street in Westview where she lived, how her
father’s grave could look over toward his small family. Later that day, we enjoyed ourselves at a
Pirates game in their beautiful new stadium.
Of course, we took our picture by the statue of the great Honus Wagner,
who, before he made it big in the National League, played baseball on a
community team in Cherry Valley with our great-grandfather and his brother.
Our final day of this heritage tour was much more
significant for me. We went to the small
hamlet of Prospect, north of Pittsburgh, where my mom spent most of her
childhood and where we would visit my grandparents when I was young. We started the morning by attending church at
Emmanuel Lutheran Church, where my grandparents belonged and where both of
their funerals took place. We got there
a bit late and slid into a back row but joined in right away, since we are good
Lutherans. The congregation is small but
mighty. There still were church members
that my mom knew, including the organist, who, as a child, played organ and
piano duets with my grandmother. We then
had a walking tour of Prospect, since it is not at all large. Down the street from church was the house
where my mother spent much of her childhood beside the mill where she played and on
to the family’s general store, now the town’s historical society. Mom showed us where everything in the store
was set up and told us stories. Then we
saw two different cemeteries, one that I remember from when both my grandmother
and granddad were buried. It’s a more
modern cemetery than most we had seen on this trip.
On the way back to Ohio, my mom read us letters from her birth
father to her grandmother and aunts during the time he was in basic training at
the end of World War 2, when he thought he was going to be a welder and when instead
he was sent to Nuremburg to be a translator for the trials. Hearing the words of a grandfather we never
knew, read by my mother, was a treasure.
This family trip, this heritage tour, started out as a gift
for my mother. In reality, it became a
gift for all of us. Now we have stood in
the places where the stories and the pictures took place. We have breathed the
air and felt the grit of the dirt on the buildings. We have learned about our family and our
history and become more of a family in the process. Did we miss anything? Why yes we did. My mom has so many more stories to tell us –
we never did get to see the spot of the nightclub where she worked as a young, naïve
piano player, getting asked out by certain famous athletes. And then there is my father. He is also the story-keeper for his
family. So, I see a trip in the near
future to visit Hocking County and Lancaster to see that history as well.
