Mom

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death, family, family history, family lore, genealogy, generations, Kentucky, life, Michigan, mother, Newell, photographs

It is appropriate that I began writing this post on December 30th, and I will complete it on December 31st (or just after).  Those two dates mark the lifespan of my Mom.

My Mom was born Billie Sue Newell on December 31st, 1940.  She was born in Letcher County, Kentucky, the second born daughter of my grandparents.

This is a picture of my grandparents from back in the 1940’s.

My grandparents and my Mom and her older sister Anna Mae lived in Kentucky for a few more years, long enough for one more sister to be added to the Newell clan.  According to my mother’s cousin, Bobbie, Anna Mae would have died about two weeks before this aunt was born.

Whether it was the promise of a better life, a chance for a better job, or possibly to get away from the memories, my grandparents left Kentucky and moved to Michigan sometime between the death of Anna Mae (and birth of her sister), to the birth of another sister in the late 40’s.  In the early 1950’s, the only boy of the family was born.

Even in this 7th grade photo, you can see Mom’s hair is dark.

My Mom went to school at Northgate Elementary.  It was the very same Northgate Elementary that both my brother and I attended as children.  I do not have a copy of it (I hope my brother does), but there is a picture of my mother standing on the steps of the school with her classmates.  I can remember my mother showing me that picture, and I can recall not really believing it was her at first.  The girl in the picture had blonde hair; my mother was a brunette.  However, there was no mistaking the features, so I knew it had to be her.

Mom’s Senior Picture

Mom attended Mount Morris High School.  She graduated in 1960.  A year later, she was married and was starting her own family.

As far as I know, the births of my brother and I went smoothly.  The birth of my brother Michael though, was anything but.  Michael had problems right from the start.  My father told me that he had several procedures done within hours of being born.  Meanwhile, my mother was fighting a battle of her own.  What complications there were, I do not know, but my mother was able to survive the ordeal.  My little brother though, was not strong enough, and he died when he was only a few days old.

My parents did try to have a child again, and I’m told that she had a daughter that was stillborn.  I was also told at one point she had a miscarriage.  My brother and I never had another sister or brother that we grew up with.  We have each other though, and trust me, one brother is enough! 😉

Though Mom had held jobs prior to marriage, once she started having kids, she was a stay-at-home mom.  A few years after both of us started school though, a program started in our district that allowed Mom to stay at home and work.

It was called “Cottage Nursery” and it was a cross between in-home daycare and preschool.  I remember having two little tables in our dining room where the kids did their activities.  I can also remember a few times being home sick and straying out of my bedroom and into the hallway so I could peek into the living room and dining room to see what the little kids were doing.

The Cottage Nursery program only existed for a couple of years, but my mother found that the work was very fulfilling.  She started working as a teacher’s aide in the district, and later worked for the Head Start program.  By the time she retired, she was teaching a few grandkids of people that she had taught as a teacher’s aide.

Mom might have retired, but she never stopped being active.  She took up golf, and was on a few regular leagues.  She had a regular Bunco group that she had played with since I was in my teens.  She got involved with the Red Hat Society.

At least two of the members of this Red Hat group were folks that my Mom knew through work.

Mom had a lot of spirit and perseverance.  She started working on an Associate Degree in Early Childhood Education when I was in my teens.  She had a lot of delays due to many things, including a divorce from my Dad, financial issues, and even a medical issue or two along the way.  She made it through though, and they even did a write-up about it in our local paper.

Mom was a fighter.  She was a five plus year breast cancer survivor.  Some people think that it was the cancer that brought her life to an early close, but it was something much more unexpected.

On Christmas Day, 2008, my mother was having family over for dinner.  When my brother and his family came over, Mom had mentioned falling from her step-ladder as she was trying to get something from over the refrigerator.  She seemed fine at first, however, after dinner she started complaining of not feeling well.  She wound up vomiting, and was having complaints of her head bothering her.  They took her to ER, where her condition worsened.  She was having more and more difficulty, and becoming less coherent.

The diagnosis was a neural hematoma.  While there was no exterior signs of trauma, it was likely that the fall had shaken something loose, and my mother was bleeding in her brain.  They wanted to operate…but they couldn’t.  You see, my mother was on a blood thinner (Coumadin) for blood clots in her legs, and they could not safely operate until she was weaned off the medicine.  By that time, she was in a coma, and the prognosis was not good for recovery.  After discussing it with all the family, the decision was made to take Mom off life support.

The last time I talked to my Mom on the phone, it was a few days before Christmas.  As usual, we talked of little things.  We talked of food we were going to cook, and the family we were going to see.  As was usual, we signed off saying “I love you.”  At that point, I didn’t know I would return from Christmas with my husband’s family to an urgent message from my brother to call.

I think one of the hardest things I ever had to do in my life was to fly from California back to Michigan to say good-bye to my Mom.  My brother said he would not take Mom off life support until I had a chance to say my good-byes.  I remember going in the room and seeing Mom laying there, hooked up to the machines that were keeping her breathing.  My Grandma was there, my Mom’s mom.  This woman had already lost her oldest child in the 1940’s, and then in the 90’s she had lost her youngest, her only son, to cancer.  She was clinging to the hope that my mother would wake.  Each small movement brought such hope to her.

The family left for a short time so I could have some time to myself with Mom, to be able to talk to her.  I hoped as I told her I loved her, and whispered to her to let her know I was OK with her leaving this world, that she could hear me, and that she was ready to cross over from this life to the next.  When my family returned, I could tell that Grandma knew of their decision.  The hope was gone, and she wept, knowing that another of her babies was leaving her for a time.

Mom’s Headstone

I try not to dwell on the tragedy surrounding Mom’s death.  Instead, I try to focus on the wonderful life my Mom lived, and the legacy she left to us, her family.

This is a four generation shot. In the front is my Grandma Newell. Behind her is my Aunt Faye (one of Mom’s two living sisters) and her husband John. My brother Tim and his wife Laurie flank my Aunt and Uncle. The young man in the back and the young lady graduating are my nephew Tim and my niece Tiffany, my Mom’s two grandkids.

My Mom and I when we took her to see the Redwoods  We had taken her specifically to have the experience of driving through this tree.  When we got there, we started to go through.  She hollers at us to stop, goes out, takes a picture of US going through the tree, and then proceeds to wave us through.  We should have known!  A few days before this, we had taken her to San Francisco to give her the experience of being driven down Lombard Street.  She says she wants to get out and take pictures from the top of the hill, so we let her out as we’re in the car line waiting our turn.  We get to the top…no Mom.  We can’t sit there forever, so we have to go.  Mom’s nowhere in sight until we get down to the bottom of the hill.  She was taking pictures of US coming down! Grrrrrr….

A favorite photo of mine. I took this of Mom when she visited us in 2000. This was taken at the Luther Burbank Gardens in Santa Rosa, California.

One side note:  I know my Mom well enough that I think I can say she would have been amused by the fact that the obituary had to put her age at 67 and not 68 because she was a day short of her birthday.  Talk about shaving points, Mom…. 😉

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One Hit Wonders

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adventure, Ancestry.com, investigation, journey, Kentucky, Lawson, Letcher County, Newell, Whittaker

In music, a “one hit wonder” is when a singer or musical group has one chart-topping song.  They have one big hit and that’s it.  However, some of those single hits for one group have gone on to be hits for others.  Still more of them have gone on to be featured in countless collections of hits from their era, or have been immortalized in movie soundtracks.

I personally didn’t know who Bobby Day was, but say the name of his one hit wonder “Rockin’ Robin” and I not only think of the Jackson 5, I also think of one particular hand clapping game we used to play to this tune; the first verse was pretty much the same as the original, but the second was a bit different.  I don’t recall the original lyrics being “Your Daddy’s in the back yard, shootin’ them dice/your Mama’s in the kitchen, cookin’ that rice.”  And, I didn’t know that before a group called the Crew Cuts did the song “Sh-boom”  (aka “Life Could Be a Dream”) that it was a one hit wonder for a group called The Chords.  If you’ve seen Pixar’s movie Cars, then you heard this song playing as the cars were cruising the neon lit streets.

There are plenty of other examples in music of course.  However, the “one hit wonders” that I am referring to in this case are those in our genealogy.  They are children in our families that show up on a single census.  Their presence is a one time occurrence for a single decade’s list, and they are never seen again.

When going through the 1940 US Census, I was looking for a potential one hit wonder in my own family.  When I started looking into my mother’s side of the family tree, I had mentioned the tragic circumstances of her older sister’s death.  Because of when she was born, I knew that 1940 would be the only census on which she would appear.  The question remained though:  would she be on it at all?

The family lore varied a lot on when she had actually died.  Some made it sound like she was just a baby or toddler.  My gut feeling though was that she would have been older.  I made that conclusion based on the story.  If she was trying to go after a bottle of nail polish on a fireplace mantle, I felt she would need to be at least three or four to attempt to climb or reach up to the mantle.

I knew where the family should be at this point, because I was able to find birth records for both the sister and my mother in the same location.  Letcher County, Kentucky is where I started my search.

The hard part was that I didn’t know exactly in what section of Letcher County to start.  I used the 1940 Census Enumeration District Finder created by Stephen P. Morse, PhD  &  Joel D. Weintraub, PhD to show me all the districts for the county.  I then looked at the descriptions.  From the 1930 Census, I knew that my grandfather’s family had lived in Magisterial District 1, which had four possible enumerations districts that made it up.  I decided I’d have to search page by page.

In enumeration district (ED) 67-1, I saw the name ‘Whitaker’ a few times, but almost all the names were unfamiliar.  One name I tucked away for a future date to research because I thought it might be a son of Vetter Whittaker, whose name helped me link up several spelling variations on multiple censuses.  So, not finding any of my family in that district, I went on to ED 67-2.

I was eleven pages in and I almost missed it.  It wasn’t my mother’s sister, but it led me to believe I was on the right track.  It also thoroughly convinced me that somehow, the census takers had decided to make things difficult for me because once again, they were mixing things up on me again.

For the fourth time, they have spelled my great-grandmother’s name wrong! And, they got my great-grandfather’s wrong as well!

The reason I almost didn’t catch this was because both of my great-grandparents’ names are incorrect.  Manford is listed as Langford, and Thenie is listed as Dina!

So, you might ask, how do I know this is really my family?  It’s because of the twins.  However, once again, we have a gender-bending census taker, because Rolie and Trolie Lawson were actually identical twin boys!  Rolie and Trolie (or as I knew them, Uncle Roll and Uncle Troll) were not just names to me.  I knew them both growing up, and they were both down to earth with great senses of humor.

In finding my great-grandparents and two of my grand-uncles, I figured I was starting to get nearer to finding the family.  In fact, on the next page, I found another possible relative.  The name was listed as Esta, but I think it might be Delbert Estes, another grand-uncle.

After that, page after page went by without seeing another familiar name.  Then, turning to my 26th page to review, I found what I was looking for (and more):

The first family listed is my great-grandmother with her second husband, and two of my grandfather’s half-siblings (I think that the last name is Juanita, which means we once again have a census taker that is a sex change artist).  You can see that the census taker probably missed filling in one field, and he was entering things in the wrong spots.  He had to go in and make corrections, and unfortunately, his correction for Juanita made her a boy.

The final line contains the name of my one hit wonder:  Anna (Mae) Newell.  As you can see, she is the only child at the moment.  Not for long though.  You see, my grandmother was a few months pregnant by this time, and before the year was out, she would be giving birth to my Mom.

My grandfather used to tell us about how when Grandma was pregnant with Mom, she would chew ice all the time.  He would say, “All day long she would just be crunchin’ on that ice.  Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch!  Sounded like a hog chewin’ on corn!”  I guess she got over it eventually; I was told when she had one of my aunts, it was peaches that she craved.

I was glad to see Anna Mae on the census.  I had already found her birth record.  Seeing another record for her made her seem more real to me.  She had lived.  She would have been about 18 months old at the time of the census, so she would have been walking and talking.  But, I knew at the same time, this young girl would in a few years die tragically.  It was a bittersweet discovery, but one that I feel helped me make a deeper connection to the aunt I never knew.

I wonder if any of you have any one hit wonders in your family?

From Paternal to Maternal – A New Path

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adventure, Ancestry.com, genealogy, journey, Kentucky, mystery, path, road block, Tennessee

For a time, my father’s family history had become blocked; I was finding no avenue down which I could make any progress.  Two paths had merged when my parents married me and had children though.  I decided to turn aside for a time from the path of my father’s historical lineage and begin to trace the path that was my mother’s family line.

My mother, sad to say, would not be able to share in this journey as my father has been able to do with the information I have gathered about his family.  She passed away a few years ago.  However, because the family had gathered together some of the history, I had more of a head start on this portion of my journey.

One of the things that intrigued me about Mom’s side of the family was the fact that, up until I had received a copy of this family history, I had always thought she was the first-born child.  But, she wasn’t!  She had, in fact been the second born; she had an older sister.

Family lore has a rather sad story about what happened to this little girl.  She had been climbing up to get an item (nail polish, as I was told) that was on the mantle of the fireplace.  In climbing, she had slipped somehow, fell into the fireplace, and was burned.  She died.

I wondered about this little girl.  It surprised me to find that while the family knew her name, they did not have anything to give me about her birth and death information.  I wasn’t sure why this was.  Perhaps part of it was due to the fact that my grandparents lost several personal items when they had a fire at their home in Tennessee.  Up in flames had gone all their memories; photographs and home movies gone with no hope of recovery (the technologies that allow for some items like this to be recovered digitally did not exist when this occurred).  The family had done what they could to restore some of these memories.  Taking from their own family photographs, they were able to compile some family pictures for them, but none of them had a picture of the oldest child of my grandparents.

It didn’t take too long to find a birth record for her, however.  Through Ancestry.com, I was able to find my mother’s birth record, and looking just a few years farther back, I was able to find her older sister’s.  The death record was more elusive.  I wasn’t able to locate any record of her death.  At this point I wasn’t sure about when she died or even where she died.  Because the story indicated she had climbed up to reach something, I figured she would be older than a toddler.  My mother’s next oldest sister, three years younger than my Mom, had no recollection of her sister, therefore, my working theory was that she had died no later than when my Aunt had been two or three.  As to the where, would she have died in Kentucky, where she was born?  Could the family have moved by then?  Eventually, my grandparents had moved from Kentucky to Michigan.  Could my mother’s older sister have died in one of those places, or somewhere in between?

My journey down this path also had another mystery I encountered along the way. One of my great-grandfathers also did not have any recorded history of his death that I could find.  My maternal grandfather’s father supposedly had died a few years after my grandfather was born.  As to when that happened or where, the family had no clue.  I had another challenge to overcome, and another potential road block loomed before me.

I’ve found on this journey of mine that the path is rarely smooth, and there are all sorts of bumps and twists and turns along the way.  As I was to find when I started into my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, those twists and turns were going to make the going a little more treacherous.  I was going to need to watch my step, or I might make a mistake that could set me off down the wrong path.