It had been an incredible year. I graduated
from college, my boyfriend and I were talking about marriage, my sister gave
birth to twins.
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| Harley and Elsie Brown with their children (personal archives of Jen Baldwin) |
My grandmother, Elsie Helen (Tober) Brown,
passed away.
I
was happy for her, that she got to meet her first great-grandchildren, but I
was missing her, knowing that she would not be at my wedding. While away at school, the two of us spent a
lot of time getting to know each other, through letters. I took up golf, one of
her passions, so we finally had something to connect us as adults, and I loved
every minute of becoming friends with her. I consoled myself with the
collection of letters I had received, carefully crafted on her faithful
typewriter.
After finals, I was able to visit her grave
for the first time. I was there most of the day, talking to her, and for some
reason I felt the need to bring those letters with me. I read them out loud,
sitting next to her headstone in the rare spring Pacific Northwest sunshine.
Crying intermittently, laughing occasionally. On my way home, my father called
me. He was at Grandma’s house with his two siblings, and they asked me to stop there. It was an odd call, very mysterious; he wouldn’t
tell me much, and I knew that cleaning the house was something the three of
them wanted to do together, without the rest of the family there.
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| Civil War Letter from one of the Lawrence sons (personal archives of Jen Baldwin) |
When I arrived, they had four letters
spread out on the table. They were old,
I knew that right away, and my Aunt simply said, “Take a look.” So, I sat down
and started reading. They were letters addressed to two women: Sarah and
Frances Lawrence. I was soon able to detect that Sarah was the mother of the
authors and Frances was the sister. They
were all dated within the span of the Civil War. Quickly, my father, uncle and aunt were
sitting there with me, offering hot coffee, which nobody touched for fear of
spilling, and a notepad.
They told me that they didn’t know where
the letters came from, or why Grandma had them in her house. No one knew
anything about them. We got my Great-Uncle Boone on the phone, and he said the
same thing, “no idea.” My Dad looked at
me and asked the question that would start my quest into our family history,
“do you think you could look it up on that internet thing?” The World Wide Web was just getting going at
that time, and the generation before me had no idea what to do with it. (Yet.
They are now all experts on Facebook.)
My Dad is a photographer, so he took the
letters back to his studio and went to work. Pretty soon I had a full
transcription, along with the notes I had taken on that day in June. Within
hours of getting home, I knew that Frances, or Frankie, was my
great-grandmother, and her three brothers: John, Warren and Mortimer, were all
Civil War veterans. We soon learned a great deal about Frankie and her husband,
Capt. Oscar F. Brown, also a veteran, and their family. My summer that year was
filled with trips to cemeteries,
long after dinner conversations at every household I could get to that was
somehow related to me. I spent hours pleading with Great Uncle Boone to let me
into some of his stash of family photos and artifacts. (He never let me in, by
the way. He was not fond of his father, and just refused to relive those
memories. I’m still not quite sure what is hidden away in his attic.) It was an
incredible experience, and it rapidly turned to self-education on the hobby of
genealogy. My family was speechless at the amount of information we were able
to accumulate so quickly. My boyfriend was in awe of the amount of paper work
quickly filling up a desk, then a box, then a file cabinet in our apartment.
By September, I had purchased my first
version of Family Tree Maker, and I was well on my way. I had already gone to
one free class at the library for “Beginning Genealogy” and had scheduled
more. NARA had supplied me with the
first of many pension files, and requests for vital records were being sent out
by the bag full.
So, when was my true moment? That day,
sitting in the sun next to Grandma’s resting place. With those letters. I’ll
never really know what inspired me to take them to the cemetery that morning,
but I believe it was Elsie, telling me in her special way that I had a lot of
letters to read that day. She has been with me every step of the way, and she
continues to inspire me now as I (sigh) finally follow my heart and transition
from the hobbyist to the professional genealogist. Oh, and those twin nieces? They are now ten
years old, and that boyfriend? He’s been my loving husband for several years
and we have a family of our own. My
little girl will someday own a collection of letters, talking about a country
at war, college classes and golf.
