GENE STRACHAN: the family drama

Eugene Strachan, Paul Strachan, Thomas Strachan and Bruce Strachan

1962 at 5103 NE Fifteenth in Portland, OR

Thomas was my father's uncle, Gene was Thomas' son.

Paul was my younger brother.

Some years ago I was contacted by Eugene Strachan, the son of my great-uncle.  To sort this out a bit for you, I’ll use real names.  Archibald Strachan, my great-grandfather, emigrated to America with his three grown children.  Once he was established in South Dakota on a homestead, his wife had a son, Thomas, with beautiful blonde curls, the archetype of a beloved child.  Things did not go well in South Dakota because of drought, and Archibald had to fall back on his master carpenter skills, which was okay.  His oldest son, Sam, had been educated in Scotland and became a teacher and school superintendent in South Dakota, then farmed, sold farm machinery, and moved to Portland, OR, where he became my grandfather.

The little boy named Thomas grew up and married a Norwegian woman.  They too had a rocky economic time until Thomas became an agricultural agent who specialized in grasses and forbs.  He had four children: Marvin, Janet, Marjorie and Eugene. 

Gene's car was a Mercedes.

Three were conventional but Eugene, after a failed marriage, and a WWII tour in New Guinea as airplane mechanic, spent his life keeping books for mining companies as far as I know.  When he called me, he was old and was “keeping books” on the genealogy of his family.  He sent me two handwritten, xeroxed, comb-bound books with all the records he had found.  They are useful.

Janet worked overseas for the Diplomatic Corps, married late and died of cancer.

This is Janet in 1965 with her father, possibly on her wedding day.

Gene wanted to come to Valier because when we broke up my mother’s estate, which included my father’s photos, I took them to protect and possibly use for my own research.  There was a specific photo of a house built by Archibald that Gene wanted to see in order to confirm a distant memory.  I didn’t want him to come.  I live in a necessity-based way that I had learned was far below the standards of my cousins, who are comfortable Pacific Coast people.

The more I argued, the more Gene insisted and then sent me a check for $500 which he described as my inheritance coming early.  Until then he had not mentioned that he would have a companion, a Shoshone full-blood grandmother who had been his “girl-friend” for years.  He was very coy about whether they would share a bed, so I was stumped about whether to put them in my so-called “bunkhouse,” a shed with two single beds that had no bathroom, or my own double bed which has a foam rubber slab for a mattress.  In the end it was clear that they were both unsteady on their feet and otherwise frail.  In fact, Gene was exhausted after lunch, needing a reclining chair which I don't have.  I don’t even have a sofa long enough to lie down on.  He did not want to go back to the bed, so I propped him up on my short sofa with a pile of pillows.

His companion — when I described the tricks of the shower, demanded to know whether I bleached it every day.  I can’t remember EVER bleaching it, but she had been trained to meet hospital standards, a matter of energy and sterilization taught to staff by nurses and administrators who had no intention of doing it themselves.  

She was a “little people,” like all the missionary-trained NA people in the 19th century who cleaned and waited on superiors.  Such folks can internalize the high standards of the people who taught them.  Now she saw I was a very deficient white person when it comes to housekeeping.  Gene never noticed.  But she was very unhappy in Valier and not happy either when I drove them all over the rez.  We’d pass a thriving ranch and she’d ask,  “Who does that belong to?”  They all belonged to Blackfeet which made her bristle with rivalry.  The Shoshone tribe ended up way down the economic scale.  She was a woman with pride which, I suppose, was why she was consorting with a white man. 

I fed them Hamburger Helper and, while I washed the dishes (I don't have a dishwasher), set them up with a funny video that was a takeoff on WWII concentration camps featuring cartoon chickens.  Otherwise, my video collection tends to French angst with sub-titles.  I don’t have television because I don’t want it and because the antenna blew over. 

The Sam Strachans leave for Manitoba

By the third day the grandmother was desperate to go home and Gene was plainly in major pain from a “sprained back.”  At last I found the photo Gene wanted: it was a mansard-roof house with tall windows and the photo was taken when someone left, maybe my grandfather’s family going north to try raising potatoes in Manitoba.  It must have been emotional time that impressed Gene as a child.  I myself was impatient because I wanted to get back to my own projects.

The date of Gene’s visit is easily established.  My neighbor came rushing over to tell us about 9/11, the attack on the World Trade Towers.  She invited us to watch on their TV, but my company was shy.  Gene was desperate to know what was happening and to see the videos.  I set him up with the computer and he watched over and over.  I knew we’d be seeing those images for the rest of our lives.  Gene was trying to figure out some way he could re-enlist, a frail old man with a bad back.  And he was all for reinstating the TV antenna himself, then and there.

They went home the next morning.  Already packed and waiting in the car, the grandmother realized she had forgotten to take her pills and demanded a glass of water.  I got it, but I had run the tap to get cold water and she said it should have been lukewarm.  They got home safely, though later the grandmother was going between houses on the rez and was knocked down by dogs, which hurt her seriously.  As I write, 2016, they have both been dead for a while.  Gene’s bad back turned out to be stomach cancer and within the year he died in hospice.  His sibs were all gone except Marjorie and he had no children.   I wondered if I'd have felt differently when he visited if I'd known he had terminal cancer.

The genealogy is often useful, though I use it quite differently than he did.  I look for patterns.  The most interesting story was not about Strachans but about a branch named Gillis, which had a Masterpiece Theatre plot I told on the post dated Monday, January 12, 2015, entitled “Gene Strachan’s Quest for the Gillis Branch.”  Interesting photos there.

http://prairiemary.blogspot.com/2015/01/gene-strachans-quest-for-gillis-branch.html 

I’m not sure what I think about Gene and his visit.  I admire his sudden burst of what was surely "Kinko Publishing".  He made several copies of the two books he sent me and also sent the information to cousins.

His idea about Uncle Thomas, who was idolized by the rest of the family, was quite different.  At one point Thomas had managed to get a job as the town’s water-master which meant maintaining pumps and so on.  When Gene was a small boy he went with the father and they found the electrical pump was in a pool of standing water.  Thomas wanted the boy to turn off the pump — he would have to stand in the water to do it.  Somehow Gene knew it was dangerous and interpreted it as his father being careless with his son’s life.  

As a boy Gene was sent to work for a neighboring farmer and that man was shocked that he brought no lunch with him, so provided a lunch, and Gene interpreted this as his father’s neglect again.  He told these stories as an old man with high resentment as intense as if they happened last month.
  

This was not Gene's mother.  This Ida Strachan lived in Africa. 

But she seems to match his idealization of his mother.

His family research began with his beloved mother, named Ida.  In his mind her resourcefulness and love was all that saved the family from the fecklessness of Thomas.  He himself married late to an older woman and they soon divorced.  I suspect he was looking for Ida and didn’t find her.  He attached her virtues to being Norwegian and Thomas' flaws to being Scots.  

It’s all an old familiar story -- do you remember that John Murie's father nearly killed him by making him dig a well so deep that it filled with gas?  But Gene's bitter tale reveals how ideas we develop in youth can control our lives forever after and close doors — maybe protective ones.  

But I love yanking doors open to check out skeletons.  So it’s clear that early on I must have been rewarded by finding out things, but I think that came from my mother's side -- she was a Pinkerton.  It does not make friends.  But pretty good detectives.

GENE STRACHAN'S QUEST FOR THE GILLIS BRANCH

In 2001 Gene Strachan, a retired relative, called to ask if he could come to visit.  He was working on a family genealogy and wanted access to my father’s photo albums.  I was in this little old house in Valier trying to write and living on pennies, not quite close enough to retirement to have income from SSI.  I tried to talk him out of it.  I didn’t know him well, barely remembered his one or two visits to my family when we were growing up. I kept trying to tell him how marginal this house was, but he wouldn’t listen.  He said he had grown up poor and could adapt to anything.

Gene's father was the little blonde boy, Thomas Welsh Strachan.

My great-grandfather, Archibald Strachan, had left Scotland with his wife and three grown children.  In DeVoe, South Dakota, homesteading, they had a fourth child in 1892, Thomas Welsh Strachan.  Gene was the oldest of four children born to “Uncle Thomas” and Ida Carrie Platt, married in June 20, 1918 in Viborg, S. Dakota. Gene did not remember a happy childhood, being at odds with his father but much attached to his mother.  Part of the problem was poverty until Thomas hit his stride as a county agent and became an expert on grasses and forbs of the prairie.

Gene's girl friend did not welcome cats.

Gene married, then divorced, had no children, and proudly served in WWII in New Guinea as an airplane mechanic.  Most of his life he had been a bookkeeper.  He would be traveling to visit me with his lady friend, a Shoshone grandmother, a CNA.  He was very cagey about whether they would be sleeping in one bed.  They were indeed daunted by my living arrangements: big puffy pillows for reading in bed, a foam pad instead of a mattress, cats who considered the double bed theirs, and the CNA demanded to know whether I bleached the shower daily.  I did not.  No color TV, no recliner for naps.

But Gene sat himself down to go through the dozens of photo albums and was very pleased to discover pictures of things he only vaguely remembered, like the house Archibald had built with tall Victorian windows in the mansard roof, which made it the coldest house on the South Dakota prairie.  

Archibald's house

We took several drives around the rez and with every jolt on dirt roads he complained about a hurt back.  After he got back home, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer and soon died.  In fact, he may have known that’s what he had before he came.  Genealogy can be a form of immortality for some people.  After one of our drives, my neighbor came knocking, very excited.  The 9-11 attack on the World Trade Towers had just happened.  Gene went out to try to reconnect my TV antenna but I blocked him.  Instead I set up the computer on Internet so Gene could watch the news videos.  He was ready to re-enlist to serve in WWIII, which he felt was inevitable.  His lady friend was desperate to go home where she would feel safer.

In a few years Gene sent myself and Scott McLean copies of two books he had hand-written after years of research on the family.  I’m typing out what he wrote about the Gillis branch.

Christ Church

GILLIS NOTES BY GENE:

We spent three days driving St. Simons, the island.  One important step was the cemetery at Christ Church.  They had a full time registrar, but no Gillis was found in the books.  I went to all the old cemeteries I could find on the island and in Brunswich.  The Christ Church Cemetery had graves that dated back in the 1820 time frame.  The other cemeteries had mostly Civil War veterans.  I went to all the Chambers of Commerce, tourist bureaus, etc.  One afternoon I read in the library at St. Simons.

St. Simons Island has a long and violent history.  Britain, France and Spain had claims in the area, many years before the Revolutionary War.  James Oglethorpe, a Britisher, arrived in 1733 and built up defenses for protection from possible Spanish forces.  Oglethorpe sent representatives to the Scottish Highlands to recruit an army and came back with a few hundred of the most experienced and best soldiers in Europe.

At this time Spain held Florida and had fortifications at St. Augustine. (I [Gene] have been on that fort in about 1957.)  In 1742 a Spanish armada of forty-plus warships appeared off St. Simons, unloaded troops and proceeded to take over the island.  When the Spaniards crossed Bloody Marsh, they were mowed down by the Highlanders who had positions in the trees.  The Spaniards were confused by that type of fighting, were routed and fled.  The book I read in the St. Simons library said that this battle determined whether North America would be British or Spanish.  The British won.  Of course, the Revolutionary War eliminated the British.

One very sad chapter in Scottish history is the Land Clearances.  In 1746 the House of Stuart (Scottish) fought the House of Hanover (German/English) over who was to rule Great Britain.  The Scotch lost.  The British then proceeded to drive the Highlanders from their homes.  In their stead a few Lowlanders and their sheep moved in.  (This is a very simplified explanation of events.)

Time is a slow fire.

Many of the displaced Highlanders went to North Carolina.  In some areas Gaelic was spoken for years.  Some, later, immigrated from NC to Georgia.  They founded the city of Darien just north of Brunswick which became a shipping point for cotton, rice and other products of the area.  During the Civil War, Darien was burned by black troops led by Union officers.  The book I read even gave the names of the officers.  It is a sore point.

Burning was done on St. Simons Island during the Civil War; burning was again done during the Revolutionary War; the Spaniards burned what they could before sailing back to Florida.

I do not know if my Great Great Grandfather, John Brown Gillis, the ship builder on St. Simons Island, came down to Georgia in the Scottish migration from NC or whether he came there directly from Scotland.  A very destructive hurricane hit the area in 1824, causing great loss of crops and buildings.  I can speculate that Gillis wanted to go back to Scotland due to his wife’s death and possible damage to his shipyard from the hurricane.

I could find no evidence of a Gillis or Gillies being buried on St. Simons Is.  On reflection, I probably should have gone to Darien and checked around.  Gillis had money.  Darien probably was more city-like and it was founded by Scottish people.  Most of the books the librarian on St. Simons Island gave me to read were on Darien and I did not read them.

[ My note.]   John Brown Gillis, who is the progenitor Gene is following here, was a Scotsman who had seven children.  The sixth was a daughter called Jeannie.  She married Thomas Welsh who was the father of seven children.  The first six were all girls and then there was a boy.  The fates of the girls and their descendants were mostly in North America, each going back to the husband’s name, of course.  Catharine married Archibald Strachan, Ellen married James S. Robertson Sr., Jeannie and Margaret did not marry, Mary married Ramsay, Mina married Allan, and John Welsh stayed in Scotland, married to a woman named Lily.  Gene and I are descended from Catharine.

The modern Darien, GA, fleet

John Brown Gillis was a ship builder in St. Simons Island.  His wife (I do not know her first name) died in about 1825 and is buried on the island, I believe.  Gillis decided to take the seven children back to Scotland via New York.  He was a rich man and carried on his person $2460 for expenses.  Gillis died in New York.  The seven children, accompanied by a black servant [possibly a slave], set sail for Scotland.  The youngest child, a baby, died at sea and was buried at sea.  The remaining six children were taken in by relatives upon arrival in Scotland.

The $2460 was an interesting story.  When Gillis arrived in New York, he put his money in a bank where it would be safe.  Gillis had a partner in the shipyard business, a man by the name of Gibson, who made efforts (according to Matt Robertson) to draw the money.  He did not succeed.  The Gillis children were suspicious of Gibson and refused to give Gibson authority to draw the money.  From this point it is not clear what happened, but the money lay in the bank for seventy years.  Imagine, a small fortune in 1825 terms was lost.

Apparently, nothing was done to dispose of the money until about 1896 when Matt Robertson’s mother, Ellen Welsh Robertson, and his sister, Jeannie Robertson Abbot, found the money with the help of a banker.  $2460 was in a bank in Albany, NY.  By this time there were 72 claimants but few close heirs.  The money was drawn and divided four ways.

Jean Gillis Welsh, Matt’s grandmother, received one-fourth as she was the lone survivor of the six Gillis children.  In 1896 the six Gillis children, other than Jean, had three living children.  Each received one fourth.

Bruce Strachan with Aunt Lily's twin daughters in Glasgow in the early Sixties.

Aunt Lily, wife of John G. Welsh, the brother who had remained in Scotland, lived in a house in Scotland that was purchased, at least partially, from this money.  When Jeannie Jones was working on the family tree in 1957, she asked TWS [Thomas Strachan] for some help.  He gave her the address of Aunt Lily, which he had in his head:  Lily Welsh, 13 Ravenswood Drive, Shawlands, Glasgow, Scotland.  [My father visited her descendents in the Sixties.  They were identical twins.]