Getting to know me

 

This photo is what I used to believe was my first memory. I am sitting in my big brother's lap on a blanket in my front yard. My other brother is holding our dog Lucky's head.  The other kid is our neighbor from across the street. In retrospect, I may just think this photo is of my first memory because it is one of the few baby photos I have of me. I do recall my mom telling me that Lucky nipped me and my mom scolded him. She claims he would sit and protect me after that. Lucky eventually was sent to "live on a farm" because he had a habit of biting people. Lucky wasn't.

In the almost two decades I've been writing this blog, I've offered up quite a few biographical tidbits about my life. I have written about trying to interview my elderly parents about their lives before they died. Neither was very forthcoming. I think they had just settled into their old age and didn't really want to think about the past. Most of what I gleaned about their lives came from stories they would tell us as kids on long car rides to go camping or musings around campfires.

Unlike most children, I was actually curious about who my parents were before they became my parents. But since they are dead and most of the people who knew them when they were young are dead, I will never have more than a sketch of who they were and who they wanted to be.

My own children don't seem to really care about who I was or who I am. I accept this because they are immersed in their now and the complications of being teen agers. I generally try to avoid telling stories of when I was their age. I like to think I can tune into the clues given by eye rolls and distant stares and have stopped volunteering stories of my youth.  I come from a distant time that they can't relate to. And the things I used to be proud of (like being a drum major at a school with a "Braves" mascot and wearing full buckskins and a headdress) are now considered incredibly not politically correct. My daughter is particularly embarrassed that I participated unknowingly in cultural appropriation by dressing as a Native American Chief. 

My high school has since abandoned their inappropriate mascot image of an Indian brave if not the name. In 2019 they changed the name of the mascot from "Braves" to "Brave" (which they somehow thought was more acceptable). But when I visit their web page there is no mention of a mascot Brave or not. Their logo, however, is now a capital "B" for Boise. 

Ancestors

 

Ever since my aunt gave me a few family portraits that had survived the onslaught of years of neglect, I have been kind of obsessed with my great-great- grandfather on my mother's side. I've written about him before. 

Not that I know that much about him other than he was born around 1830 in Ohio, spent some time in a lunatic asylum, made chairs for a living and then became a farmer. He married my great great grandmother (20 years younger than him) five years after he fought in the civil war on the side of the Union. I say fought, but I don't know whether he ever saw any action. He enlisted ten months before the war ended. He applied for a pension in the late 1880s and lists he suffered from chronic diarrhea as a result of his service.

So I don't think he led many charges while he served in the war.

He did manage to father six children including my great grandmother. He and his wife also ended up raising my grandmother after her mother died giving birth to her second child who died at birth. 

There is very little other information about my great-great grandfather other than the sterile census documents that tell me what he was like. I am more than curious as to why he spent time in a lunatic asylum when he was 20. And I wonder why he enlisted in the Union Army when he was 35. What brought he and my much younger great great grandmother together? Why did they end up moving to Boise? How did he and my great great grandmother lose all of their ranch land and leave his many children and grand children with squat?

I mean, there is nothing. My great great grandmother got written up in an early history of Idaho as this great pioneer. He is barely mentioned. All I have are a couple of portraits and photographs where he stares stoically at the camera with this distant look.

Yet still I am fascinated. His blood is in me. He was a civil war veteran even if he spent most of his time squatting in a latrine. He is the reason I grew up in Idaho. He is basically the only patriarch I have. My father was adopted and that part of the family tree is pretty much empty. My great great grandfather is the only one who stands out who wasn't crazy (other than that stint in the asylum) and a wife beater. My mother grew up hating her father for beating his wife and kids on a whim. To his credit, his father was a few checkers shy of a board, too. My mother told me stories of him hiding in the root cellar of my great grandmother's house, tying his underwear in knots so they would be difficult to wash, all because he was jealous of her answering the door to traveling salesmen.

I don't have any portraits of him. I do have a couple of photos of my mother's abusive father, including some of him in his army uniform at the end of World War I. The war ended before he even made it out of basic training.

Dis chord, dat chord

Country music singers
Have always been a real close family
But lately some of my kinfolks
Have disowned a few others and me
I guess it's because
I kinda changed my direction
Lord, I guess I went and broke their family tradition 

--Hank Williams Jr

I grew up without a lot of family traditions. Oh, we did the usual things white lower middle class families do like decorate Christmas trees, carve jack o lanterns, eat turkey and dye Easter eggs. We had barbecues with the neighbors and occasionally celebrated birthdays together, but in retrospect, it was all generic.

My family didn't come from recent immigrant stock so we had no old country traditions. My grandmother's (my father's mother) furnishings didn't come over on a boat. It mainly came from Sears and Roebucks. Some of it is considered antique now, but none of it was handmade or anything but functional.

My mother came from a family with 12 children. There was basically nothing passed down. At least there was nothing material passed on. They were poor and barely had food to eat. At times they lived in a tent. So the only tradition they passed down was survival and very little talk about what had been a hard life.

A couple of my mom's sisters would bring their families over for select holidays. They had followed in their family traditions of having lots of kids. So I had (and have) more cousins than I can count. My own mother had stopped at three (and one half sister I didn't know about until years after my mother died). My father was an only child who discovered he was adopted after my grandmother died.

So I guess family secrets are part of my family tradition. But I think it falls more into the category of things that no one talked about. Like my mother's nephew (son of her oldest sister) whose wife killed their five year old son (who had been born just a day before me in the same hospital) with a shotgun. The mother then turned the shotgun on herself. She left behind twin babies who later had mental struggles of their own.

Family matters...

I spent last week in Boise, the city I grew up in in Idaho. When I returned to work, everyone asked me how my vacation was.

It was not a vacation. I was there to deal with family matters.

I should define family here. One of the schisms I have discovered about having a wife and children of your own who have become your "family," is dealing with the other family -- the ones you grew up with. I left my family at home in Washington to go deal with my other family in Idaho.

I feel bad putting my other "family" in the category of something to deal with. But once I left Boise, I entered a psychological witness protection program of my own creation that in essence reinvented me for me. I could, on the surface anyway, unload all of that baggage of childhood and teenage angst that hold us chained to the bottom of the lake drowning if we plant ourselves in the place we grow up in.

It's not that I had a terrible childhood. But I always felt out of place in Idaho, smothered by a conservative mindset that frowned on liberal thinking or creativity (despite what the Idaho Tourism Board would have you believe).

Idaho to me is a place of farms, deserts, pseudo cowboys and trailer parks. Boise is a strip mall of urban sprawl laced with every known chain restaurant known to man. For some reason, the only forms of recreation in the city seem to be drinking, eating and going to movies. The city didn't even have a shopping mall until after I left in the early 1980s.

Boise depresses me. Maybe that is because I felt depressed there growing up. Maybe it is the legacy of my roots. My great, great grandfather moved there with his family in the late 1800s. My genealogy work show he spent time in a mental institution as a young man in Ohio. He recovered enough to fight in the Civil War, get married and raise six kids and then my grandmother (after her mother died during childbirth giving birth two her second child who also died).

My grandmother married a field hand at aged 17 and had 13 children. My mother has nothing good to say about my grandfather. My research shows he was in the army during World War I but never left the United States. My grandmother divorced him once mid-stream of having the 13 kids and then remarried him in a weak moment (or was it just survival). I have never been able to confirm what he did for a living other than work around farms and ranches and beat his wife and children. He died in his early 40s.

My father was adopted by a childless couple in Portland when he was 5 years old. They moved to Boise in the mid-1920s. My grandfather worked at the Idaho Statesman newspaper in the print shop. My grandmother was a self-proclaimed Belgium princess and the bane of her daughter-in-law's (my mother) existence. After marrying my mother in the early 1950s he accepted property that was right next to my grandparents as a gift to build his tiny suburban castle one.

My mother still lives in the castle. It has had many additions over the years, and is surrounded by various forms of development that would be a land-use planners worst case scenario for suburban growth. Rows of multi-family "skinny" townhouse structures have replaced many of the single-family houses that used to skirt my childhood home. My grandmother's house still stands next door but has suffered renovation by a Salvidor Dali inspired nitwit who added a pond in the backyard, a plant shed, a hot tub and other out of place additions before going bankrupt. My mother is unclear who, if anyone, lives in the house now. Neighbors I grew up with have since died or moved out and been replaced by foul mouthed white trash drinking beer while racing their riding lawn mowers.

My mother still parcels out her day with gardening, chopping wood, breaking rocks with a 10 pound sledge hammer and babying a mangy mutt named Duchess who is three times her size. I went to Boise concerned about her health and hoping to get her to put aside her Christian Scientist leanings to get a check up and left, unsuccessful, but mildly comforted that my mother is amazingly vital for an 84-year old woman. I am grateful that she is able to stay in her house for now rather than wasting away in an assisted care facility.

The bright side of the trip was that all three of my mother's sons were with her on Mother's Day. I don't think that has happened once in at least two decades if ever. We gathered the day before and took my mother to a Chili's restaurant for dinner. My oldest brother groused a bit about going to a Chili's on a Friday night. He was sure we would have to wait for a table. It is something he inherited from my father. My father would panic if there was any kind of a wait to get into a restaurant and would immediately think of alternatives. Because God knows waiting 20-minutes to be seated is worth driving 30-minutes across town to find a restaurant with a table that is ready right now.

There was no waiting at the Chile's. Mom sat across from me intimidated by the glossy, multi-paged menu and the din of Chili's Saturday modest and basically young evening crowd (does Chili's have a senior citizen clientele at all).

My oldest brother ordered for my mother. I am not sure why there is ever any confusion about what she should order. She always orders cheeseburgers and then looks baffled at how big they are and how to eat them when they arrive. When this one arrived, my mother sat there staring at it and I encouraged her to dive in. She motioned towards my brother and his wife and I realized that, being born again Christians, they were saying grace. I shook my head and muttered, "Oh Lord," a little too loudly. No one heard me. My brothers have never heard me.

Mother's Day, everyone met at my middle brother's house to go out for breakfast. He wanted to go to some "Everything Egg's" restaurant that had opened up in a strip mall near where they live. I asked him what they served and he answered, "Eggs." My brothers never hear my humor either. The restaurant had a wait so we immediately all left and drove to an IHOP where there was also a wait. I resisted asking my brother what they served at the IHOP.

My mother sat staring baffled at the multi-paged, colorful IHOP menu. I am sure she would have ordered a cheese burger off from their lunch menu, but my oldest brother stepped in and ordered for again. As the oldest brother, I believe he thinks he has to step up to the plate for such major decisions (the ones about trying to get my mother to a doctor are left to me). My mother looked even more baffled when the french toast with a side of pancakes arrived. I just hunkered down to my chicken fried steak and eggs and drank bad IHOP coffee. After breakfast, we all went back to my middle brother's house. My oldest brother and his wife were driving back to Oregon, so they said their goodbyes and transferred my mother to me to get her home.

As I drove my mother home, I began to feel the signs of the bad cold my children and wife had had in the couple of weeks before my trip working their way through my body. I left my mother happily feeding her dog a Milkbone dog biscuit, retreated to my room at the Airport Comfort Inn, hunkered down and pretended the sounds of the freeway next door was the ocean.

Each day for the rest of the week I would get up, go to the pitiful little workout room with a treadmill and a stationary bike and work out. Then I'd drive to my mother's house, watch her do laundry or chop wood and ask her if she needed anything at the store. She'd tell me that she had plenty of frozen waffles and how she didn't like the chocolate Pop-Tarts she'd got at the grocery store when my oldest brother and his wife took her shopping on Saturday. I wasn't able to confirm until Wednesday that she did need to go the grocery store where we stocked up on dog treats and banquet frozen dinners.

After a couple of hours of watching my mom engaged happily in household chores, I would drive around the city on auto-pilot. I didn't really have any destination in mind. One day I went to the mall. Another I stopped at an antique mall. The next I ended up at the cemetery and visited a few relatives (including my great, great grandfather veteran of the lunatic asylum and the Civil War). I felt like a familiar stranger everywhere I went. Although I grew up in Boise, I have lived in Washington for more years than I did in Idaho.

A couple of nights I went out to dinner with my middle brother and the bulk of his family (wife and son home from college). Both nights were filled with political debates. He if far right and I am middle left in the political arena. Despite my best efforts to change the subject we always ended up slapping each other up side the head with our beliefs. His wife and son sat for the most part in uncomfortable silence. It was a familiar scenario for us all.

My last day in Boise, I checked out of my non-descript room at the Comfort Inn, packed up my leftover chips and sodas to give to my mom and drove over to take her out to one last lunch before I dropped off the rental car and checked in at the airport. My head still throbbed from inflamed sinuses aggravated by my cold and the stale air conditioning at the hotel. We settled on Red Robin where I was pretty sure mom would order yet another cheeseburger that I was pretty sure at this point would end up in a doggie bag that really would be for the dog.

Since my oldest brother wasn't there, I ordered a cheeseburger for my mom and watched her baffled look when it arrived and she pondered how to bite into it. My painful headache made it difficult to stifle my impatience as she turned it around and around.

"Just squish it down and cut it in two, mom," I snapped impatiently. She began giggling and I felt terrible since I know my mother laughs when she is uncomfortable and embarrassed. She began telling me a story about the neighbor named Misty and her husband Jesse. Misty was nicknamed Misty because she always got emotional at family visits and misted up. Mom asked Misty's husband Jesse if he had a sister named Layle since mom brother had once dated a woman named Lois who had had two children named Jesse and Layle. It was, of course a different Jesse, but once my mother's synapses fire in a particular direction, they don't change course easily.

It was the third or forth time I'd heard about Jesse and Misty that week. I wanted to scream that I didn't care about Jesse and Misty. They were renters in a monstrosity that had been plopped down next to my childhood home years after I had left the land of Famous Potatoes and the City of Trees (which really doesn't have that many trees). I told my mother that she had already told me this story. She stopped, blinked a few times, and began telling me about them again, from the beginning as if that would help. I sucked down the rest of my diet Coke to drown the scream of impatience.

I feel like a terrible son and a terrible person because I wanted to be anywhere else at that moment. If I had to be there, I wanted to be talking to my mother about how important it would be to go to the doctor and develop health care plan for her that didn't involve prayer, the Bible or simply ignoring any problems she had. I wanted to be talking to her about how I wanted my children to know their grandmother. I wanted to talk to her about how I wasn't ready to lose my mother even though people keep telling me that she is 84 years old and she has lived a good life.

But I had said those things at the beginning of the trip and been met with a look of betrayal and fear that told me my mother would never go to see a doctor and I was foolish to have taken this trip and tried to convince her otherwise. Now all I could do was sit there and listen to my mother talk about Jesse and his wife Misty and the Poinsettia they had given her for Christmas.

The check mercifully came and I paid it. Mom packed up her cheeseburger for the dog and we drove back to her house. I wandered from room to room looking at fade photos of my childhood mixed in with photos of nieces, nephews and unknown people that I imaged may have been Jesse and Misty. There was still about five hours until I needed to be at the airport, but I told my mother I needed to drop off the car and go. She hugged me and thanked me for everything I did. I hugged her and told her how much I loved her and that she had nothing to thank me for. I hadn't done anything.

The dog danced around her legs as I closed the gate and stepped into the rental car. My mother waved as I drove off. She's happy I told myself. She has her dog. She has her house and her garden and the neighbors who like her. I drove past the grade school I'd attended and headed toward the airport where I dropped off my rental car and then lucked out by getting on an early flight to my home and my wife and children.

The airplane lifted off and Boise settled back into the past.

Cousins

My mother had 12 brothers and sisters. Most of them were as prolific as my grandparents at producing progeny. So, I swear you can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone who is very likely one of my cousins. The sad thing is, I can't even tell you how many cousins I have without looking it up on my family tree software program. What's even sadder is that I honestly don't really know a single one of them.

Although my 81-year old mother has difficulty remembering what state she lives in, she can still pretty much tell you the names of each of my cousins, their spouses and their offspring. She can also tell you which one robbed a bank, which one is a cross dresser and which one thinks they are the Scarlet Pimpernel.

Most of my interaction with my cousins was when I was a kid. The photo above is of me (center in case you couldn't recognize my smile) with my cousin Mike and his sister Mary Lou. They were my Aunt Irma's oldest kids. Mike was a year older than me. Mary Lou was my age. Aunt Irma had another six kids before divorcing her husband. His name was Coombs. That was reason enough to get a divorce.

Aunt Irma was a twin. Her brother, my Uncle Ira was special. When he wasn't in that place in Idaho where they keep special people, he was living with my grandmother sequestered in his bedroom convinced the communist Chinese were tunneling under the house to get him. Apparently he felt he had something the communist Chinese wanted.

My Aunt Irma always reminded of Jimmy Dean, the country singer who went on to lend his name to pure pork sausage. She kind of looked like him, but she really sounded like him when she talked. I could never understand why my mother's side of the family all talked like they had just stepped out of the Grand Ole Opry. Perhaps it is just the way country people talk.

Odd as she was, Aunt Irma at least had a sense of humor. My Aunt Gladys didn't. She was just odd. We used to call her Aunt Happy Butt behind her back (Glad Ass...Happy Butt...get it). Aunt Gladys married a man named Otis. It was his second marriage and he came with a passle of kids from his first marriage. From the looks of them, Otis could have very well been married to a first cousin when he produced them. My brothers and I nicknamed them "the Martians."

I could go on and on. Aunt Dolly had eight kids. Uncle Jimmy had five. Uncle Dewey had three. Uncle Marion had five. Aunt Alma had four. Uncle Tommy had three.

Don't even get me started on second and third cousins. It's a wonder Tess and I weren't related before we got married.

I guess that could be another post.

My own private Idaho

You're livin in your own Private Idaho. Idaho.
You're out of control, the rivers that roll,
you fell into the water and down to Idaho.
Get out of that state,
get out of that state you're in.
You better beware.

You're living in your own Private Idaho.
You're living in your own Private Idaho.
--Private Idaho, B-52's

If you have never lived here, you probably don't think of Idaho as being hot. It is. At least southern Idaho and Boise are. It has been in the 90s here. But unlike my childhood here, I now have air conditioning. It helps.

I imagine they had air conditioning when I was a kid. We just didn't have air conditioning. We had fans. They managed to keep the hot air circulating until night. Then we had windows. But the heat got to me. It slowed everything down to a painful pace. Too slow for my young mind.

Summer in Boise was a dead time to me. Everything turns brown in the heat. It rains in summer here, but not enough to make the place green. It's like that now...brown. Boise's aura has always been brown.

The photo above is of Table Rock, the landmark plateau that overlooks Boise. The white cross has been there for as long as I can remember. It stands there as if waiting for members of the Klan to light it up at any time. But as far as I know there are no KKK in Boise. There used to be a pretty larger contingent of John Birch Society members, however.

I'm actually at the airport in Boise now. They have free Wifi access, which is very progressive. I drove to my mom's before coming to the airport and said goodbye. I left her standing in front of her house moving the sprinkler around.

I guess I accomplished what I came her to accomplish. I sat with my mom for hours listening to what she could remember about her family and growing up. I brought home a few more old photos that I will scan and add to the family archive I have begun.

I guess the sense I have ended up with is that my mom remembers what she can but has blocked much of her childhood out. It was not a happy time for her. Mom mother has always giggled when she is nervous or uncomfortable. She giggled when she told me of the blackeye her father gave her when he thought she was dating a mormon boy.

She also giggled when she talks of the nicknames all of her brothers and sisters had growing up. Her's was simple "Fat." She never was fat, but she always saw herself that way because of her childhood.

Her brother Edgar's nickname was Bert. Mom said that she and Edgar were inseparable as children but she couldn't say, "brother." It came out "Brrrr" which people interpreted as "Bert." The name stuck.

Bert never went to high school because "the old man" didn't believe in education in the same way he didn't believe in associating with mormons. My mom snuck off to go to high school. She was the first one in her family to graduate.

I learned, or relearned many things about my mother, including how she met and married my father. So it was time well spent.

Still I am glad to leave this place and the heat that slows down your brain, despite the air conditioning. I'm sure I will return, but Boise will never be home to me again.

Memorial: Edgar Austin Clark

I never met my Uncle Edgar. He died in a small airplane crash on February 12, 1949, about nine years before I was born. He was and is a mystery to me.

Edgar Austin Clark was born in Boise, Idaho on September 20, 1922, the firstborn son of Edna and Raymond Clark. He took his middle name from his grandfather, Austin Clark. That, as far as I know, was his sole inheritence.


Edgar was the second in a family of thirteen children. He is the frowning boy on the left in the photo above standing next to his younger brother Herb, his oldest sister Alma, my mother Jennie Ruth and my Uncle Charlie (Dewey). It was not a wealthy family. They knew nothing of the collapsing stock market that unleashed the Great Depression on the country. But they felt the impacts very dearly.

It was December 1941, not long after the birth of the last of his thirteen children, Tom Clark, that my grandfather Raymond died of a heart attack in the one bedroom room house the family shared in the rural outskirts of Southern Boise. His surviving eldest sons had very few options at that time when it came to work. The military seemed to be the only one hiring.

I do not know whether my Uncle Edgar joined the Marines or if he was drafted, but he ended up in Guam fighting as a Corporal during World War II. He returned from the war with no physical injuries. But in the little I heard my mother talk about him, the war had taken its toll on his spirit. She talks of him working on "dead wagons" recovering the bodies of dead American soldiers killed in assaults on the Japanese strongholds in the South Pacific. She said he didn't like to talk about his experience in the war. But it had changed him.

On February 12, 1949, my Uncle Edgar went along with a friend of his in a small airplane for a joyride. The details are sketchy, but apparently his friend "borrowed" the plane from its owner without permission. My uncle survived the Great Depression and World War II. He didn't survive the crash of the stolen airplane he was a passenger in. He was 27 years old.

Last Thanksgiving, Tess and I were in Boise visiting my family. We had gone to Morris Hill Cemetary late one day in search of the graves of my great grandparents and grandparents buried there. While looking for my grandfather Raymond Clark in the military portion of the cemetary (he was a private during World War I) I stumbled upon my Uncle Edgar's gravestone.

I realize this isn't much of a memorial. A man's life deserves more than eight paragraphs and few faded photos. But it is all I have. And it is why I'm determined to unearth what I can find about my family. With that note, I'm leaving tomorrow for Boise to visit my mother and salvage what I can from her memory. Maybe then I can give my Uncle Edgar a bit more.

Rock of ages

History of Idaho, The Gem of the Mountains; James H. Hawley, editor; Illustrated; Volume III; Chicago, The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company; 1920; Pages 479 & 480:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

MRS. AMANDA MARTHA KNOX.

Mrs. Amanda Martha Knox occupies an excellent ranch property two and a half miles southeast of Boise. She is the widow of George D. Knox, who followed farming on that ranch and there passed away May 24, 1911. Mrs. Knox was born in the Shenandoah valley of Virginia on the 4th of January, 1850, her parents being Thomas Jefferson and Mary (Mowry) Knotts. During her early girlhood she accompanied her parents on their removal to Washington county, Iowa, and was there reared to womanhood but was not yet twenty years of age when she became the wife of George D. Knox. Later she accompanied her husband to Mitchell county, Kansas, where they lived for some time, removing from the Sunflower state to Idaho about 1890, at which time they settled at South Boise. Later they took up their abode upon the ranch southeast of Boise, where Mrs. Knox now resides, and throughout the intervening period to his death Mr. Knox was engaged in general agricultural pursuits there.

To Mr. and Mrs. Knox were born six children, a son and five daughters: Louisa, now the wife of George W. Butler, of Boise; Elva May, who gave her hand in marriage to Edward E. Butler, a brother of George W. Butler; Edith, who is the wife of Henry Dalrymple; Charles Bruce, who is a farmer of Canyon county, Idaho; Martha Ann, who is the widow of William H. Fease; and Jennie, who became the wife of Edward Bush, both she and her husband being now deceased. The last named left one child, Edna Letha Bush, who was born December 10, 1901. She is now a young lady of eighteen years and since the death of her mother has lived with her grandmother, Mrs. Amanda M. Knox. The family is one of prominence in the community, enjoying the warm friendship and regard of all who know them. Mrs. Knox has long lived in this district and has therefore witnessed much of its development and progress, her memory constituting a connecting link between the primitive past and the progressive present.

Amanda Martha Knox was my great, great grandmother on my mother's side, and I'm willing to bet that she is the only one in my family to have ever made it into a history book. But although the author suggests that her memory constituted "a connecting link between the primitive past and the progressive present," very little of my great, great, grandmother's primitive past filtered down to my progressive present.

I've mentioned my little forays into my family history through amateur genealogy. I have managed to piece together some of Amanda Knox's story. And although it may not be part of the mythic wild, wild west I've been focusing on (a predominately male-centric west as Shandi pointed out), I think it represents the real west of the common people and one with more of a matriarchal bent.

Amanda was only 20 years old when she married 40-year old George Dawson Knox who had only been honorably discharged from the Iowa Volunteers four years earlier after a stint with the Union Army fighting in the Civil War. George had migrated to Iowa from Ohio. His parents were from Pennsylvania. If you look at a map of the United States you can see that he was following a strong tide that was sweeping steadly west.

How my great, great grandparents met and most of George's history are lost somewhere in the chaos that followed the war. After getting married, they migrated to Kansas where I believe all of their six children were born. Again, the only thing that is certain about what took them to Idaho in 1890 is a wagon.

The youngest of their children (shown above sitting on Amanda's lap) was Ada Janette Knox, my great grandmother. She was barely six years old when George and Amanda moved their family west to Boise, Idaho to "engage in general agricultural pursuits." They lived on a ranch southeast of Boise.

If you are unfamilar with Boise (as most people are), it is situated in a valley carved out of the desert by the Boise River. Legend has it that a French trapper stumbled out of the sagebrush desert into the wooded valley and cried, "Le bois, le bois...," -- the trees, the trees. So Boise is the City of Trees (though many have been cut down as part of our progressive present).

I somehow inherited portraits of of the Knox family after my grandmother died. My mother ended up with them and passed them quickly to me, knowing I was one of the few in the family that looked backward in time as much as forward. This is a portrait of my great grandmother Ada or "Jennie" as she apparently liked to be called. She was likely not more than 17 when the photo was taken and I find it odd referring to this lovely young woman as my great grandmother.

Soon after this portrait was done, 17-year old Jennie ran off and married 27-year old Edgar Ellsworth Bush in May of 1901. Seven months later, in December of 1901, my grandmother, Edna Letha Bush, was born (and yes, I've done the math and can guess why Jennie ran off to get married).

I know very little about Edgar Bush, other than he was born in Missouri and may have been a farmer. But after two years of marriage, 19-year old Jennie died giving birth to a baby boy. The baby also died soon after. Edgar quickly remarried and left my grandmother to be raised by her grandparents. Edgar and his second wife died ten years later of tuberculosis. My grandmother only saw her father a couple of times before he died.

My mother relates only sketchy bits of information about my grandmother's life on the ranch with her grandparents other than she was isolated and lonely. Apparently she was so lonely she ran off when she was barely 18 with one of her grandparent's ranch hands, Raymond Sylvester Clark. By that time, George had been dead for eight years.

Edna didn't run far. Raymond apparently had very few ambitions (including work). They ended up on some property adjacent to what was left of Grannie Knox's ranch living in a tent. Although Raymond wasn't much on working he did, father 13 children, the third oldest being my mother, Jenny Ruth Clark. Some kind neighbors got together and built a one-bedroom house next to the tent to provide the family with some more permanent shelter.

The house is still standing (or was last Thanksgiving when I snapped this photo).

Grannie Knox died on July 4, 1936, soon after this photo was taken of her and her daughter Elva. My mother was 11 years old at the time. She remembers a strong, yet kind woman who often sat on her porch in a rocking chair, smoking a corncob pipe.

Amanda was buried next to George in the Morris Hill Cemetary in Boise. Her "excellent ranch property two and half miles southeast of Boise" has long since been razed to make way for cookie cutter subdivisions. I do know that none of the property or proceeds from it filtered down to my my side of the family.

I realize that this isn't an exciting story. It's a simple story of a young girl from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia swept up in a historic migration west to Iowa, Kansas and eventually another valley in Idaho. What it is, is a real story of how the country evolved.

It is also a story puzzle of my family with many pieces still missing. But before I die, I plan to do my best to uncover as much of Amanda Martha Knox's memory as possible and reconnect those pieces of my history that link "the primitive past and the progressive present."

Oh Brother...

Time it was

And what a time it was
It was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences
Long ago ... it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left of you

"Bookends Theme" by Simon and Garfunkel

As I've been sifting through the photographs I've been scanning as part of my family tree project I've run across quite a few shots of my older brother Dan and I. That's him on the left in the photograph above.

Dan's birthday is coming up tomorrow, the day after mine. This always confused me as a child. He is my older brother yet his birthday was the day after mine. In my toddler brain, that should have made him my younger brother.

I can imagine me being born the day before his birthday pissed him off. He was the 4-year old baby of the family and boom, I came along and messed up his birthday celebration and moved him up into the middle child slot. I don't think he ever really forgave me for that.

I marvel sometimes how different my brothers and I grew up to be. Ted, my oldest brother ended up in a near nameless small town in Oregon working for the highway department. Dan stayed in Boise and became a teacher. I ended up Seattle and by default, marketing. And in this era where you reach out to someone on the other side of the world in the blink of an eye, my brothers and I rarely talk.

I sometimes wonder if it is because time creates distance that can't be bridged with small talk. It's hard to share hopes, dreams and disappointments in annual visits on holidays. I know the Cliffnote versions of my brother's lives, but that is about all. We share common parents, but not opinions or paths.

And it is not that I don't love or care about my brothers. I look at the photos and realize that they may not be part of my day to day life, but they will always be in my memories and in my heart.

So to my big brother Dan, I wanted to wish you a happy birthday and tell you I'm proud of you. I have always kept the newspaper clip that the Idaho Statesman ran about your first year teaching and I think you produced a couple of amazing children (though I don't think they realize how lucky they are to have an uncle like me). And I wanted to remind you, that just like at your wedding, I will always be the best man.

I had to get that shot in. He's my brother after all.

Photographs...

Time it was and what a time it was it was,
A time of innocence a time of confidences.

Long ago it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you

Bookends, "Simon and Garfunkel"

Maybe it is middle age. Maybe it was the visit from the life insurance salesman the other night. Or maybe it is just my own mortality tapping on my chamber door ala the raven. But I've been in this frenzy of late tracing the meandering branches of my family tree.

I really began this journey back in December of last year (see My roots are showing...). I followed my father's adopted family (or at least the H**** side) all the way back to Cornwall, Devonshire, England to discover that H**** was originally Hele and that there was nothing Irish about our name.

So, having discovered my adopted Irish roots were originally planted in English soil, I turned to my mother's side of the family to trace my maternal bloodlines. My mother's maiden name was Clark. Clark is right up there with "Smith" in commonplace names, so tracing it too far back hasn't been easy. And to further complicate things, my mother comes from a long line of farmer stock that have believed in sowing seeds prodigiously. In other words, the Clark men, although not particularily successful or noteworthy in history have managed to produce huge families.

My mother was one of 13 children born to my grandmother, Edna Letha Bush (born 1901) and my grandfather, Raymond Sylvester Clark (born 1894). Raymond was one of nine kids (Roy Eugene, John Ralph, Dwain Joseph, Glen, Leonard Rueben, Lola Mae, Zoola Carol and Florence) born to Austin Roland Clark (born 1870) and Jennie Lucretia McKissick (born 1878) .

Austin was one of four kids (Mary, Cora and Thomas) born to John Clark (born 1839) and Susanna Steele (born 1843). And that is it for the Clarks. As you can imagine, John Clark is about as common name as you can get and the only record I can find for him was an 1880 census in Missouri when he was 40 years old. He was a farmer and his father was born in Alabama and his mother was born in Kentucky.

I haven't totally given up on John, but tracing such a common name is a challenge. I find it especially challenging trying to find free information on the Web because, as I noted in my last entry about my geneology experience, most of the so-called free sites take you right back to Ancestry.com or Geneology.com.

Rather than bore you with the minutia of my search, I will cut to the purpose of this blog entry. As I've dug through the records trying to find information about my ancestors, I am particularily amazed at how little information there is about people's lives left after they die. If you are lucky, you find a notation in a census log stating their age, occupation, number of childrend and their race.

I've also discovered that I don't come from a long line of over achievers. Most of my ancesters were farmers. The most noteworthy line within my family tree seems to be the McKissicks who can be traced back to Scottland (via Ireland). And one Daniel McKissick was actually a leutenant in the Continental Army and was wounded. A few of his descendants actually have more than a simple journal entry left about them (including Cornelius who shot a bully trying to jump his land claim in Iowa).

But even though my family didn't change history or leave much of a mark, I still wish there was something more left of them. I'm sure there are papers and images buried in trunks somewhere in someone's attics that could at least cast a little more light on who these faceless names were and how they made their way from Illinois, Iowa and Ohio to Idaho.

This Thanksgiving, Tess and I are going to Boise for our annual family visit. While I'm there I'm going to visit Morris Hill Cemetary where many of my relatives are buried. I'm not sure what I expect to find there. I'll be lucky if I can find their markers. But at the very least, those markers are proof that they existed. And something inside me needs that.

Because as I gaze into my family tree, I also look forward to the linage that stretches after me. What will I leave in the world? And who will care?