Well, doggone it, April is over, and so is the A to Z blogging challenge. Once again, life got in the way of my fun, and I did not come anywhere near to completing the challenge. Sometimes inspiration just was not there, and I can't force it. Doing so results in inferior blog entries.
As we Jacksonville Jaguars NFL football fans say, "There's always next year."
We embrace a lot in our family; we're very huggy.
However, I'm thinking today of a different usage of the word, as in: How much of the wide circle of people related, however tangentially, to me am I going to embrace, that is, include in my family history researches?
I could stick only to my direct line, but that could be boring.
I could cast a very wide net and go running after people with the most minute relationship.
I could try to figure out some middle-ground rubric to observe in my investigations.
Or I could do what I do: come across an interesting-sounding relation and pursue it to as many documents as I can find, and celebrate the findings. Like finding out that my husband is distantly related to one of Florida's best and most-loved governors, Lawton Chiles. Or like finding out that there's a family that is related to both my mother's line and my father's. Or like finding out that my maternal grandmother's third husband was a ne'er-do-well who ended up in a mental-health facility. Good stories, interesting people, and not always with happy endings.
I know I'll never find everybody, and won't find everything about everybody. I don't have that much time left. Besides, genealogy is a journey, not a destination. So I'll be happy with what I find, and hope that someday, someone will carry this family history a bit farther along, and will find more interesting people about whom to discover good stories.
A to Z blogging challenge.My aunt . . .
Well, let's go back a bit. I always knew Elizabeth Reed (1909-1967) as my aunt, my mother's sister. However, my mother was an intra-family adoption. So the parents she grew up with were, genealogically speaking, her uncle and aunt, and Elizabeth Reed was actually my first cousin once removed.
I have, however, always remembered her as my aunt, as that is the function she fulfilled, and fulfilled well and truly, for me.
She was the Director of Health Information for the state of Florida from the late 1940s to the middle of the 1960s. As she worked in such an important position, she had only Saturdays to get all her errands done. She would often invite me to tag along. I think part of it was to give my mom a break from corralling me from some mischief or other, and part to keep me in line. But my aunt "Sissy" and I also had big fun on those Saturdays, which became known as "Do Day."
We would tell jokes, sing songs, and just generally be silly. She taught me a song from her younger days as a nurse, working with midwives in rural areas of the Florida Panhandle. We recited poetry. And we talked.
Usually, first on the Saturday stops for errands was the American National Bank, in the San Marco shopping center on the south side of Jacksonville, located where the western terminus of Atlantic Boulevard merges into San Marco Boulevard. Crossing from one side of the shopping area to the other could be an interesting activity. In the bank, one of the employees, a black woman everyone knew as "Cee," would tend a cart with a supply of cold lemonade and small cups. She would dole out lemonade to the customers, and it was most welcome during Florida's hot summer.
Next on the list might be The Silk Shop, a fabric store run by the family of an elementary-school classmate of mine. When you walked into the shop, you were hit right in the face by the smell of the sizing in the fabrics. It could also sting your eyes a bit. It took a few minutes to get to the point where you could breathe and open your eyes. "Sissy" would buy fabric and patterns for dresses and other garments that she would have made by her dressmaker. From time to time, she also bought fabric for items to be made for me. I sometimes got to pick out the patterns.
Another "Do Day" stop might be the Southside Branch Library, part of the Jacksonville Public Library System that I would later end up working for. "Sissy" had seen to it that I had a library card, and I would check out books.
For back-to-school clothing for me, around the end of August or the beginning of September, we'd go downtown to Cohen Brothers or Furchgott's, Sears or J.C. Penney. Or in November, we might visit one of those stores if I had grown into a need for a new winter coat. And we might grab lunch at Morrison's Cafeteria, a Jacksonville institution for decades.
Things are different now, and we do a lot -- probably the majority -- of our shopping online. It's convenient, it's efficient, it saves gasoline. But it deprives us of the feeling of community as we used to shop at venues owned by people we knew. It deprives us of the human interaction that we all need. Sure, online shopping has its uses, but we might all benefit from getting out into the world on our own "Do Day."
My family, paternal and maternal, keeps coming up with ties to Bloomington, Illinois.
My sister and her husband used to live in Champaign, which is just a few miles southeast of Bloomington.
My paternal grandfather Walter Hetherington Packard was born in Normal, which is just a hop, skip, and a jump north of Bloomington, and appears to have been swallowed up by the Bloomington municipality, looking at it on Google Earth.
My great-great grandfather Mathew Hale Packard and several of his siblings settled in Bloomington both before and after the Civil War. Mathew Hale Packard died there. They had all come down from Canada. Some went first to Massachusetts, others to New York, before all settled in the Illinois city. Some of these Packard family members were in Bloomington by 1855; others did not arrive until ten years or so later, after the Civil War.
Mathew's brothers whom he joined in Bloomington were Charles R., Major Wellman, William B., Thadeus Bullock, and Francis A. (“Frank”). Two of his sisters were also in Bloomington: Mary Frances, married to Joseph Munroe, and Emeline, married to Joseph Munroe's brother George.
My mother's side also has ties to Bloomington, in the person of Nathaniel Strong Sunderland, widely known as N. S. Sunderland. He provides a bridge between my maternal and paternal lines, being related to both. He is mentioned by his brother-in-law, Major Wellman Packard, in a letter Wellman wrote to a fellow Illinois lawyer, Abraham Lincoln. N. S. was the uncle of Sarah Ann Sunderland, my maternal great-great grandmother.
N. S. Sunderland had a farm somewhere between Towanda and Bloomington. Towanda lies just a few miles northeast of Bloomington. His farm was prosperous. His livestock was valued at $1,200, which in 2023 dollars, would be $21,837.89. His farm, exclusive of livestock or crops, was valued at $11,000, or $200,180.65 in 2023 dollars.
Not all of these branches on the Packard and Reed family trees remained in Bloomington. N. S. Sunderland later moved to Larned, Kansas, where he served several terms as a popular mayor. Oscar Merry Packard, son of Mathew Hale Packard, moved to southern California, where he prospered in his occupation as a real estate agent.
They all left their mark on Bloomington. Major Wellman Packard even had a street named for him. Bloomington also left its mark on the family, with both branches experiencing many events there.
Thanks, Bloomington.
Today is the first day of the A to Z blogging challenge. This fun challenge invites people across the blogosphere, whatever their subject matter, to blog every day for 26 days (or fewer, if you just can't come up with something for the letter X).
I have a lot of people absent from my life: my father, my mother, my brother, the aunt who helped raise me, my grandparents (none of whom I knew), the grand-aunt who served as my grandmother by her and her husband's adoption of my mother within the family, my best friend in high school, my in-laws, favorite uncles and aunts, cousins, and more. Our younger daughter, who is 53 years old, has cancer. She is in remission for now, but it's probably inevitable that she will predecease me and my husband. So many losses . . . so many memories.
In the Simon & Garfunkel song "Old Friends," songwriter Paul Simon reminds us: ". . . Preserve your memories; they're all that's left you."
Photographs are a fine way to preserve our memories. Like this one of me and our younger daughter giving our dog Diamond a bath back in the 1980s. Unfortunately, our daughter's head is behind the dog! Not only does this spark a great memory of our younger daughter and our wonderful dog, but also of the house where we lived at the time, a house we loved, and lost in the economic disaster that befell us in the 1980s. Another loss . . .
In doing genealogy, we document and lend permanence to memories. My father died when I had just turned seven years old, and it is through genealogy that I have come to know him better. Researching his Navy career, and his activities after he got out of the Navy after World War II, has given me a great deal of knowledge about his life.
Family stories give us access to memories, too -- the memories of other people that are given to us in stories. In our retelling of them, we claim them as memories. They're not direct memories of our own experience, but we remember our family by these stories. They connect us to our ancestors.
Preserve your memories; they're all that's left you.
It's time once again to get ready for the A to Z Blogging Challenge. I'm taking a lazy way out -- mainly as how my involvement in several projects and an illness in the family do not leave me time to give a whale of a lot of thought to a more specific, narrowly focused theme.
My theme is: Whatever! That is to say, I am going to leave the way open for me to blog about anything in my family history or in genealogy in general that tickles my fancy. The biggest challenge is going to be making a blog entry every day, as the Challenge is designed for us to do.
So I hope you'll be curious enough to look in on my adventure, and will enjoy reading my blog.
