While we may want to explore the vague beginnings of our family history, through documents and the heresay of other family members, still the truth is already in us.  We know this best when we lose that beloved family member.  In the loss we feel the pain of generations, the generations that have given us many good unassailable traits which we rely on everyday.  But in loss we know best how far back we go.  My paternal grandmother died in the nineteen-thirties, twenty years before I was born, leaving her young son, my father, bereft for a lifetime.  My maternal grandmother was my only chance to know the love of a grandmother.  And though she died when I was only three, we had nevertheless been so close that I miss her to this day.

She seems like a mystery to me still; memory is a poor substitute for reality.  Where grandmothers are concerned, you want the real thing.  Mine was a religious woman.  She kept a color portrait of Jesus on the wall in her bedroom between her two meticulously made single beds.  I remember her bending.  She would bend to make the bed.  She was the woman who bends to do a day's work.  She was my grandmother.  She is the woman who bends.  (I do not usually feel so strongly about the loss.  But it is all there.  I lost her early.  I have only hidden the loss.  But the loss remains like a long decorous vine, growing and somehow flourishing throughout the years. connecting me to my youth, and to her.)

My grandmother was a hard worker, this was very plain.   She had little money.  But she taught my mom what it was to be the eldest.   I, too, am the eldest.  My grandmother provided values that will persist be passed down.  And she reassures my measure:  she bought me five new baby dresses with her wages as a nurse.  She loves me. 

She loves me.

I could never understand why or how a grandmother leaves.  As I grew up I could only picture her at my doorstep.  (She lived with us for awhile during her last days with cancer.  I did not know then why she died.  I was only a few years old.)  As a child I pictured her lifted straight up from the front porch to heaven.  She was gone.  And she never came back again.  I looked for her.  But she never came back. 

(I cannot stress enough how literal a child's mind is.  I used to ride my swing in the backyard so high.  I used to park a chair in the hallway at night, only haif-dressed, and I would stare up at the white ceiling.  Still, no one would call.  Even in my dreams she would rise to heaven.  This was the mystery, how she was here today but instantly gone, never to return.  The hard nature of life got me early.  I don't know if I ever cried.  I know my mom cried.  We lost grandmother near Mother's Day.  I know this because when I became a genealogist I searched for her obituary in the local paper.  I found it surrounded by ads placed by the local downtown restaurants  --  Posey's, and several other places for Mother's Day dinner.  Mom lost her mother.   I lost my grandmother, the grandmother of the five dresses.) 

I knew her.  I used to go up into the attic for quiet.  I used to explore there for the true depth of the family archive.  Oh it was in this box and stacked there, but that made it all the better, for I could piece it together myself.  I could ask myself the questions you ask when you find a piece randomly.  I had often looked at my grandmother's nursing manual.  It was a strange book.  It was the only one I had ever seen whose pages were tied together with string.  The manual was entitled, "Chicago School of Nursing."  The pages must have been acquired in pamphlet-sized groupings which the owner  -- my own grandmother  --   would then tie into the hard black binding throughout the progress of the course.  There was also a book called "Being Born," one of hers I would imagine, a book which I was sure my parents would not want me to read.  Still, I looked at its images of the embryo growing in the mother's womb.  The baby made progress.  This was how it all worked.

ULtimately, my mother established a sort of occupational link to my grandmother.  Mom took a physiology course at Sacramento High, where she graduated a year before I was born.  She wrote pages and pages of notes using a blue fountain pen.  In those days you used fountain pens.  She drew pages and pages of freehand anatomical drawings.  She hand-tinted the organs.  She once told me she enjoyed the course.  She also told me (when I was an adult)  that when she was that age she wanted to be a doctor.  So this had been her goal, I thought to myself.   When I was growing up I did not know this.  She divulged her occupational intent only after I had moved out and along in life and was myself a mother.  She made renderings.  She drew, in fact, very well.  She enjoyed art as well as physiology.  For her, these two things went hand in hand.  I think my mother was embarrassed, however, about the quality of the poodle skirt that she wore.  You know what I mean.  In those days, the example of style and class displayed by debutante society was a more important consideration than it is today.  My mom's youthful penury was the way she really chose to define herself.  She wore her dffidence for her whole adult life.  She let it get in the way of her attending my college graduation.  But she had come from a woman who bent to help others.  Who worked harder than anybody just to make it a little bit good.  Who engaged in the practice of nursing.  She had genealogy, this mother of mine.  So many days I looked upon their books, grandmother's old nursing manual, and my mother's old blue binder with the free-hand anatomical drawings.  I saw both there.  These were the women whom I thought I knew, but only to some extent, it turns out.  I grew up alongside mom.  But like my long-ago grandmother she was still a mystery.  Mom held back her heart and her talent.  She could have been who she really was.  She thought that mothering meant you had to be someone else.

This is how it all works.  Someone who remembers a grandmother  -- like me  --   misses her and writes about her.  The truth comes out.  It makes its way to the page because I am the recorder and I will write about such things.  I believe my family to be important.  It will make it to print. Grandmother is missed.

It is a matter of record, how far back I go.  Someone bought me dresses.  And then she left.  I didn't get to say goodbye.  I still can't.  I won't do it here.  She's still with me.  (Signed G. E. Claire.  Copyright 2011 by G. E. Claire.   All Rights Reserved by the Author.)
 
"Aug 6
"Dear Ann & Jerry

        How are you guys?  I thought maybe you'd be up before now.
        How did your sunburns come out?  Forrest is fine now back to normal anyway and I feel much better.
        I have got to get busy on sewing on the 2 older girls clothes.  It costs so much for their clothes.  I'm also going to can some tomatoes.  We have lots of them and we all like them canned.
        I guess we will get to the fair on a week-end probably as the 2 kids start school early on Thur 28th.  Well kids hope to see you one of these days.
        Love    Madelyn"
 
This post is about being the eldest.  It is dedicated to all of you who are the eldest.  We have always had so much work to do.  We were never appreciated for our contribution to the family in general or to our siblings in particular.  And our parents took from us far more than I think they had a right to, because they thought we were older than we really were.  But it eased their own burden to create more burden on us.

We have always worked hard as our parents' eldest children.  We were asked to do the things the younger ones could not do.  We worked in the yard on Saturdays.  We did all the work that our parents did not do.  We swept with a broom too big for us.  We did the job well just the same.  We had heart and confidence because the eldest owns that, that confidence to achieve.  I don't know where it comes from.  It's just there.  Perhaps it is those high expectations that parents have of us from the start that gives us belief in ourselves.  Still, that doesn't mean we're respected for accepting their challenges.  We do it because we have to, don't we; we always did.  We're the eldest.  We push those big brooms, we clean the oil off the driveway when we're slightly older children, using that tall wood-handled broom, a bucket of sudsy water, and lots of scrubbing.  We rake the leaves with our little sisters and brothers.  But we do most of the work, that part of their work they did not know how to do or which they had not the patience to do.  And they get the credit, for trying.  We must do it well (whatever the job is), just because.   There is no room for error.  I must edge the lawn, tug out weeds out from the sidewalk cracks with that special pronged device which has no name.  When the job is done I get no accolade.  Rather I was summoned to the bathroom to wash my dirty little hands.

We, the eldest, in order to make a more perfect family, took on the frequent responsibility of watching our younger siblings. We loved them.  But in order to feel older we felt we needed to be closer to our same-age friends across the street or down the block than to the smaller family members.  Little kids can get in the way of the eldest's social progress.  This does not need cogitation.  It has always been the case.  Still, parents are likely to rely too heavily on us, especially during the summer months.  We'll watch the younger ones at the pool or at the playground.  (These were the old ways.  Maybe parents are more cautious now.)   I developed my sense of my role in the family partly by babysitting my two little sisters.  In the only formal photograph taken of the three of us during our very young years, I was, naturally, stood in the middle, taller than either of the other two, and I looked to my left and down into my sister's face and she looked up at me.  We smiled.  We had the same blue satin hair ribbons.  We had the same tans on our forearms and faces from the summer spent outside.  We wore the same light blue Easter dresses with the broad white sailor collars edged in thick lace.  We were sisters.  I knew that.  I loved them and all. . . . (No one ever said thank you, big sister) . . .  Those little ones, they ask for things.  They need what they need.  And we're really lucky to be the ones to give it to them.  Lucky us.  We're the eldest.  But it's hard.  Too bad parents don't look down into our little faces the way they look into the faces of the littler kids.  We all need to be treated with appreciation.

Once, when I was six, I played a spontaneous game of four-square in the living room with my two littler sisters.  We were having adroit fun.  Here, adoit means we're just good at it.  Being spontaneous is its own talent.  And we were talented, just like all kids.  Too bad I was the eldest.  My parents stuck me with the cost of replacing the living room lamp that broke when the ball knocked it over.  I was a good little saver.  I had pride, as the eldest, in my savings plan.  I got five percent interest on my Bank of America passbook in 1963.  They were very generous back then.  The bank's representative had come to the school and spoken in front of the classroom.  He sat in one of our little chairs.  He explained matters.  He gave us little passbooks.  They came with little manilla keeping-envelopes with twine closures.  I could record my progress.  I liked writing things down.  I was already reading my mother's big blue dictionary which she got as a premium from Better Homes and Gardens for ordering a series of cookbooks.  (We were always getting books delivered to our door.)  I liked the thumb indexing.  I still read the dictionary.  I try to keep a single sheet of the words I am working on in my pocket at all times.  But to get back to the point:  I had money saved.  In the early Sixties, a third of a hundred dollars wasn't bad.  My dad was only earning fifty dollars a week at Western Electric as a CWA union member.  So I guess I had more or less about a week's union wages saved up.  Pretty good for a baby of six.  I could have spent it all on five-cent candy bars.  Do you know how many candy bars the eldest could buy with thirty dollars?  You figure it out.  I liked Hershey bars.  But I saved my money.  And my parents took it, every last penny.   My money confidence hasn't been the same since.  I offer a piece of wisdom, hard earned, to parents:  It is very important to keep the good intentions of the eldest in place, even if it means having to compensate for their children's occasional lack of judgment.  The stronger the eldest feels, the more likely she is to be able to serve the parents well when they get older.  That's a real important cultural point if you think about it.  We all love our parents.  All we ever wanted to do was to make them love us a little more every day.

When you look into the face of the eldest, you have to love what you see.  We try harder. 

Signed, G. Claire, the eldest of three.  (Have a great (eldest) day!)
 
I have been white a long time.  As far as I know that is my total history.  My family is white.  Though I've never really considered the issue as part of my genealogy, I'm afraid that the consideration is relevant now.

I live in a world that is mostly not white.  I have never noticed it as such.  It has however occurred to me lately how rude the Mexicans are to me sometimes.  They are a dominant feature of this town.  It cannot be helped I guess that the people who come here, to the land of my hard-working forefathers and foremothers, often act rudely to the next white person that they see.  I am not a white person who has sought hegemony in Mexico; I have not sought my dominance in a place that I know so little of, as if I had that right, to disrespect it and its landscape.

I was travelling home on the bus this morning with my young person.  She was sleeping at the time, so she has no memory of this incident.  I was looking off into the distance as the sun came out and I could once again see fully out the windows.  The unseasonable damp had started to dry, the pavement would soon lighten into its accustomed pale cement shade which we associate with summer.  An old man walked up the narrow brief stair of the bus entry.  He wore a warm corduroy jacket with the lapel pulled up to his narrow jaw.  The corduroy was good, but its color was no longer true.  He stood for a good while until he could obtain a seat.  I sat mid-bus.  My feet were swollen.  I myself was in no position to stand during the abrupt affair of constant stops and starts offerred up by the impatient driver who seemed to like to gun the motor and wheel into the curb abruptly.  A  Mexican Man in his Thirties sat on the bench seat on left side, in front, along with a Polynesian university girl who was looking rather alertly for her stop near the college.  Between the two of them they occupied three seats.  The (black) driver did not seem to notice.  The old (white) man was the only old one on the bus, I observed.  And he went without a seat. 

The young college girl  --  prettied up for the day in earrings and pulled back, well-combed hair, sat.
The Thirty-something Mexican man, sat.
The people on the opposite bench seat, sat.

And the (white) man stood.  I just thought I would add that he was white because no one else was.  I just thought I would add that I am white, and that I felt white on the bus at that moment.  It is not hard to feel threatened when you understand, deep inside yourself, what is really going on.

The girl got off at her much-looked-for stop.  The old man took her place.  She did not look back.  She did not notice anything wrong.

Was it his age?  Certainly not.  Anyone could see that the man could barely stand.  He tried to hold on.  He did not stand upright.  Anyone who saw him there and then saw first his frailty except those who were cruel enough to see  that he was white.

There is a group of students on the local San Jose State University campus who rationalize the need for overt favors to immigrants (you can find their signs posted around town), but based on what I have seen here I think that they are really just self-promoters looking for an easy way to the riches all of us seem to desire.   I would guess that many of them  -- as was the case with their peer today  --  simply do not see the value of a human being without first identifying the race of that person.  But for them, racism only works one way.

Just yesterday a thirty-something man on the lightrail train sitting two seats behind me was talking with the man sitting next to him.   The speaker was Vietnamese, as he firmly and repeatedly identified himself.  I could not help but hear his over-spoken diatribe:  that China is the best country, that they have the best economy; that China is smart, should take over Vietnam.  And that he would go home someday.  He was eating our food, breathing our American air.  And he was bold enough to assert the preeminence of China in the hearing of my child.  China is number one, he was careful to note in the hearing of the Americans on the tax-payer funded train he was riding on.   He was critical.  It was only natural, he implied.  It would happen.  I was stunned.  I had never heard anything like this.  When I encountered him again later (quite an unfortunate surprise) at the nearby market where I was shopping for breakfast bagels and juice, I called him a Communist under my breath.  I haven't repeated here everything I heard.  But now you know what I know, what I felt, at the time.  I was being wiped clean of the relevance of my ancestors and of my American culture.  I was being told that my country was weak, and owned.  I was the dirty cloth by which that man would achieve his goals then move back to Vietnam with the good graces of the United States behind him.

I was using the computer today.   We had gotten to know the staff.  They were collegiates, stiff in spine, good folks who volunteered their time to help folks in need, regardless.  I note that Cynthia is white because, now, most of her kind have disappeared from the staff in that office.  While she was supremely capable, she did not speak Spanish.  They already have many Spanish-speakers on staff.  But she was no longer required  --  on that basis alone  --   just the same.  Since when is it more important in this country to speak Spanish than English?   I grew up listening to Jane Pauley and Tom Brockaw on The Today Show, two articulate journalists whom I respected for that quality.    I was still in high school when I tuned in every morning to hear the various topics of the day duly treated and discussed.  They used to say in general during that time that it counted to speak English well.  That English was the pathway to success.  I read my English Dictionary everyday.  I grew my English vocabulary like a garden.   I loved my language.  I self-consciously practice it to this day. 

When did it become more important to be Mexican than American in America?  As far as I understand my history, America acquired California in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.  California is ours.  It is mine.  It is American. 

My ancestors came here from Wales.  They were pioneers.  They came the hard way, before the railroad.  They had faith.  Their family was good.  They mined here.  They raised their family here.  They lived here.  They claimed the land in a way that the Mexicans were unwilling to do when it was theirs.  These Welsh ancestors furthermore spoke the English language.  Daniel Bradford Richards, one of the members of the Richards family whom I wrote about in an earlier post, is the child of good gold-rush pioneers, grandson of the Welshman and Welshwoman who came to America in the 1830s, my great-great grandparents.  They came across the Atlantic, on faith alone.  Daniel became a San Francisco lawyer and a pre-eminent occupant of the famous Monadnock building.   He could not speak Spanish.  But it was America, then as now.  English is what mattered.  He studied,  He gained the respect of the  people around him.  He grew his English the way his forebears perhaps had not done in Wales.  What mattered was studying his lessons (they worked hard at their lessons, the children of that generation).  What mattered was being good at what he did, helping people, and knowing the good English language.  This family succeeded because they cared, worked hard, and spoke the language of their new country.  They would be truly American.  I cannot say this about many of the Japanese, Chinese and Mexican people I see and hear everyday around me in this city, people who insist on the culture and the language of their forebears, who daily speak something other than English in our American ears and dare to take from the resources of America at the same time.  At this rate, no one will know who the Pilgrims were in a generation's time.  Mao, kimonos and quincineras will be all that matters here, in the land of the free, where we do not dare to stand for ourselves as real Americans anymore.  I am only a mother.  One who has spent her lifetime securing her family history to pass on.  I see what I see.  And I record it as I see it.

Signed, Your friendly neighborhood genealogist and proud Californian.

    Author

    G. Claire is a descendant of Welsh Immigrants who came to California during the time of "the Great Excitement," also known as the Gold Rush.  She is, in addition, a descendant of young Mayflower passenger Mary Allerton and of Thomas Cushman, an Elder of the Plymouth Church.  The author is proud to be descended from Silvanus Brown, a member of that most notorious group of Vermont mobsters known as The Green Mountain boys.

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