52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 15 -- Big Mistake

This week in 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, Amy Johnson Crow wants us to 'fess up.  

My Big Mistake wasn't specifically made with genealogy in mind, but turned out to be related to genealogy long before I got bit by the genea-bug.

My grandma, Mary (LeSourd) Reed, was really my grand-aunt.  My mother was an intra-family adoption.  I never knew any of my actual grandparents, maternal or paternal.  

But "Chollie," as we all knew her, was as much my grandmother as anyone who bears that genealogical label for reals.  And she had a bunch of stories about her life in Indiana, where she was born and raised, and where she was married to Perry Reed.   There were also stories about the time she and her husband and family lived in Pensacola, Florida, later on.  Many stories involved my maternal great-grandparents, too, and some of my grand-uncle Perry Reed's siblings.

I was a teenager; it was the early to mid 1960s.  My mom had given me a little inexpensive tape recorder.  The sound quality wasn't the best, but it was adequate.  The mistake?

I didn't record my grandma's stories when I had the chance.

So many times in the intervening years since she died in 1978, I have wished I had recorded those stories.  Several of them would have helped me sort out the various members of the extended Reed clan, and would have provided information to liven up their entries on the family tree.

I do remember one story, however, and will share it here, now.

My great-grandmother Florence Elizabeth (McKee) Reed was a formidable woman who ruled the large Reed clan with an iron hand.  One day, sometime in the 1890s, she made a large pot of oyster stew.  She ladled a portion into a tureen and corralled two or three of her sons to take it around to an old lady who lived in the neighborhood.  All the children were convinced the old lady was a witch.  When I was a child in the 1950s, we had such an elderly woman in our neighborhood, subject of the wild imaginations of children and nothing else. 

The Reed boys approached the old woman's home with trepidation.  Steeling themselves to the task, and more fearful of reporting failure back to their mother than of any possibility of supernatural power on the part of the home's lone resident, they knocked on the door.  When the woman answered their knock, one of the boys said something like, "Please, ma'am, our mother made this oyster stew, and thought you might like some."  They handed over the tureen.

The old lady said in return, "Well, you tell your mother thank you, and that I'm not particularly fond of oyster stew, but seeing as how she was so kind to have made it for me, I'll eat it if it pukes me!"

The boys dashed off the porch and ran home, and we aren't sure if they were screaming in fear or in laughter all the way.

"Seeing as how you've been so kind as to make it for me, I'll eat it if it pukes me" became a family saying, meaning thanks for the meal, and it was grandly delicious.