I've been lucky. Both sides of my family had an interest in writing things down. Having even a hint of those before us is a treasure, especially when they were farmers like my people and had little excitement in their lives they felt worth to write about and had failures they didn't wish to write about.
There was my great-great grandmother who didn't want to teach her girls how to spin flax by hand, because she didn't think it was right that they should have to work so hard when cloth was readily available in stores. There was another multiple great grandmother who wrote about moving to Illinois as a child, camping near the mouth of the Illinois River on the Mississippi and hearing a mountain lion cry in the night there. I've been to the spot. There's a park there now. My ancestor may or may not have known it, but it seems a couple guys named Lewis and Clark also camped there with their crew preparing for that journey up the Missouri River, the mouth of which is in sight just across the Mississippi from that place.
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Date: 2017-03-09 02:03 pm (UTC)There was my great-great grandmother who didn't want to teach her girls how to spin flax by hand, because she didn't think it was right that they should have to work so hard when cloth was readily available in stores. There was another multiple great grandmother who wrote about moving to Illinois as a child, camping near the mouth of the Illinois River on the Mississippi and hearing a mountain lion cry in the night there. I've been to the spot. There's a park there now. My ancestor may or may not have known it, but it seems a couple guys named Lewis and Clark also camped there with their crew preparing for that journey up the Missouri River, the mouth of which is in sight just across the Mississippi from that place.