The little blue booklet,
with a hand-drawn sketch of a peasant girl in high-top shoes
on the cover, is held together with a simple plastic
binding, which shows that preserving the family stories
doesn’t need to be costly or complicated.
“Memories of Mary: The Swiss
Maid Who Became My Grandmother,” the title reads. I picked
it off my to-read stack of books just before my 52nd
birthday, and right there on the first page it said, “Mary
Werner Hostetler — June 29, 1864-April 11, 1945. She was
exactly 98 years older than me.
Mary’s father died when she
was 6 months old, and her grandfather took on the difficult
role of providing for the widow and her four children. In
1871 they followed a relative to America, where life was
better but still hard enough that Mary had to work for
another family to earn her room and board.
That family happened to be
Mennonite, and Mary was baptized into the church at age 13.
She married a Mennonite man from Missouri named Joseph
Hostetler, and in 1895 they moved to Oregon, north of Salem.
In 1911, they moved to this area. “One mile from
Harrisburg,” the book says, adding, “Later, they bought some
land across the road and built a better house and moved
there.”
I wish Berniece had included
maps.
The 78 pages include stories
from Mary’s daughters and a dozen other descendants. Mary
became a well-known and respected woman who was called on
often to care for the sick, deliver babies and prepare the
deceased for burial.
In other chapters, Mary’s
grandson Herman broke his arm four times, Lloyd and his
brothers made “the first self-propelled windrower ever
built” out of a 1931 Chevrolet truck motor and frame turned
backwards, and Berniece didn’t have a name until she was 4
years old.
“The single most important
thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all:
Develop a strong family narrative,” writes Bruce Feiler in a
New York Times article called “The Stories That Bind Us.”
Feiler goes on, citing a
study, “The more children knew about their family’s history,
the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the
higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they
believed their families functioned.”
Stories told orally are the
most entertaining, with dramatic aunts’ expert timing and
emphatic descriptions. But oral tales die out with the
tellers, and only the most persistent stories survive.
Also, spoken stories
change in the telling, but a story on paper is a fixed
reference. One family legend that every child in the vast
relation knows is how Great-grandpa Daniel’s life was
threatened by a carload of rough young men because he
refused to buy war bonds, but then his attackers suddenly
left. Years later, they told of a mysterious someone keeping
them from carrying out their plans.
My 15-year-old daughter
Jenny decided to write a poem about this event for a
contest, and she used Berniece’s book to review the facts.
She learned that three men, at three different houses, all
faced the same threats.
Daniel’s son Frank said
later, “Only a few years ago, I found out why they didn’t
carry out their plans. They were prepared and ready to tar
and feather us, but when they came there was a heavenly
being that stood between them and us and they couldn’t get
ahold of anybody. It happened at all three places.”
Happily, Jenny’s poem won
fourth place out of 87 entries. I imagine her poem tucked
into the back of her grandchildren’s copies of the little
blue booklet.
A written record is also
valuable because not everyone is a storyteller. While
reading “Memories of Mary,” I was shocked to realize that if
we depended entirely on my husband passing on his family
history, our children would know only a tiny slice of it. He
is great at passing along the values but less adept at
repeating the tales.
Also, books are not
limited by distance. Great-grandchildren on the other side
of the country, far from the aunts and family reunions, can
have the same stories easily at hand.
We have this record only
because Berniece, the youngest of a large family, recognized
the value of recording the family history and decided it was
her job to make it happen.
Berniece interviewed her
elders, wrote it down and typed it up. She prodded siblings
into sharing memories, transcribed tapes, edited a lot and
found a printer. She got a nephew’s wife to draw the cover
illustration, bought multiple copies and passed them out for
years, even to shirttail relations like me.
When you are young and
your parents are healthy and your children are babies, you
don’t think about writing things down, beyond jotting on the
calendar when little Amy started walking and the cute
phrases Ben said.
But everything changes
when parents are suddenly elderly. You remember a vague
image from a long-ago tale and ask your mom about it.
“What was that story
about the time Grandma took you and Ervin on the train to
visit Aunt Kitty in Cleveland? Who was Aunt Kitty? And do I
remember right that Grandma wore a big hat?”
“How’s that?” says your
mother, once a fountain of stories. “Aunt Kitty?”
That’s when you
frantically start to write down all that you remember,
asking your siblings, writing to aunts and uncles. “Was
‘Mommie Schlabach’ a twin?” “Who gave Mom that little table
in the bedroom?”
Every scrap of
information becomes valuable, every written word, the tiny
spidery words on adhesive tape on the back of a bowl from
Grandma Yoder. “For Amos. 1946.”
Amos is my dad, and this
summer he is working on his memoirs. In Oregon for an
extended visit, he sits on the couch and writes, careful
Palmer method on the back of papers advertising an odor
remover.
Some people choose to
type their stories, tell them to a rapidly typing
grandchild, or even put on a headset and speak into an
Audacity recording program on a computer.
But Dad is 97 and prefers
to write his history like he has always written letters — by
hand, on his lap.
Dad loses his pen. I
replace it. He misplaces his glasses. A kind soul finds them
under a pew at church and drops them off. I bring him cups
of hot water, his favorite beverage. I praise what he’s
written and stay quiet when he’s concentrating.
I pray, let him get it
all down. Please, let his mind stay sharp, let the words
form and flow into his hand and out onto the paper, let them
make sentences, paragraphs, chapters.
Let him tell his story.
He has covered his
childhood, the history of the Amish church in Oklahoma and
his Civilian Public Service days.
His grandparents lived in
Mississippi, but the Amish group left because of tragedy —
the young women would get sick and die in their first
pregnancy. Malaria, people guessed.
His mother survived only
by the grace of God, he writes. Then they moved to a safer
climate in Oklahoma.
The Amish young people in
his day had problems, he continues, because the young men
liked to have fast horses and decorate the manes with shiny
red and blue rings. The girls liked patent leather shoes and
fancy dresses.
I smile. “Oh, Dad!”
Civilian Public Service
changed his life. He went from being on the farm and going
to town maybe twice a year, to living in other states with a
group of conscientious objectors, working on dairy farms,
planting trees and seeing the wider world for five
challenging years.
At times he uses outdated
terms now considered inappropriate or even racist.
“My best friend in school
was an Indian boy named Woodrow Wilson.” I don’t correct
him, knowing that his heart appreciates all kinds of people
and fearing that I would stop the creative flow.
He is a perfectionist,
writing and rewriting. “Rough draft” he notes in a box at
the top of the page.
“Just get it down,” I
tell him. “We can edit it later.”
My daughters type up the
chapters as he finishes them. Jenny reads slowly. Emily
types.
“Nah vos ich neksht
schrava vill, sell muss ich decida druff,” he says in his
German dialect when he finishes the chapter on Oklahoma. “I
need to decide what to write about next.”
“Your marriage,” I
suggest. “And your children. College. All the places you
lived.”
He nods, thinking. I
leave quietly and he picks up his pen and a new sheet of
paper.
Slowly and deliberately,
he writes. It’s as though he is digging up a treasure,
handing it to us for safe keeping, passing it on, word by
careful word.
“He needs another day,” I
pray. “Strength and clarity, words and sentences.”
Because we are not
finished yet, and there is always more story to tell.
