A hunting we will go

Hunting for ancestors that is...no weapons involved. An ad caught my eye last week...which seldom happens...and the next thing I knew, I was consumed with the notion that I needed to search for my ancestors(which I think hits all of us from time to time). The ad, coupled with the fact that I'm reading a book about the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Colony, well...I felt all those people now long gone tugging at my sleeve.

Many, many years ago my grandmother (dad's mother) gave me a small packet. It contained, among other things, Civil War letters written by a great, great, great grandfather...a Confederate soldier in a Union prison, or prisoner of war camp. There were also receipts for taxes paid, college tuition for a great great grandmother, and a couple of handwritten genealogies...written in either fountain pen with an ink now brown and fading, or pencil! The letters were written in 1862 and 1863 and the handwriting is hard to read...and the ink is fading. The paper is slowly deteriorating as well...so I have to figure out how to preserve these documents.

It is these tattered, fading pieces of paper that have the greatest pull on me. One of my ancestors wrote these things and now there is no one living who can tell me about them. I was interested as a kid, but I don't remember what I might have been told, or how much there may have been to tell. I do have some sense of where all these "relations" were from though.

In my father's family, Mississippi (where the soldier was from), Tennessee, and Missouri seem to be prominent. Georgia I think is also in play...Missouri also is found in my mother's family, but Bohemia and Moravia are most prominent. At that time they were both part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, becoming Czechoslovakia years after my great grandparents immigrated to America. I have visions of them and what that America was like, what they found when they settled in Racine, Wisconsin with others of their families. Racine is the site of one of the first Czech newspapers in the US...maybe there is information to be found there.

It is an odd feeling, this connectedness with people long dead, many of whom I never heard of, or saw photos of. My Czech grandmother (born in this country) did begin to record information about the family, stories she remembered from childhood in Illinois. Sadly, she died less than a year after this process was begun(only a cassette tape or two survive). We always thought there would be more time to listen and ask questions. There wasn't. I met her mother only once (my great grand mother), already in her 80s and I was maybe 10. Her oldest daughter, my great aunt, would translate and speak Czech with her...yes, she knew English, but in her old age the Czech came to her more easily. I was not really old enough to realize what a treasure she was and what I might learn of family from her. By the time I realized I wanted to learn, she was gone.

I think of the immigration issues we now face. My great grandparents came into this country legally. They paid for their passage, signed all the proper documents, became citizens of America while other family members chose to stay in "the old country". They raised nine children here, paid their taxes, and never forgot those who stayed behind. But they did it legally, not imagining that there might be another way. It is on their shoulders that I now rest here...if not for them, I would not exist.