SEARCHING THE MAP OF FAMILY

As the amazing study of human mind and inheritance continues and as we apply what we learn to our friends and family, the result is high impact but hard to resolve.  Here’s an example.

https://medium.com/the-break-down-wake-up-journal/i-went-my-entire-life-not-knowing-i-was-autistic-aa869b7b09ab

My mother and my father’s only sister were not much alike and not exactly compatible, though they never let their relationship get out of hand, except for private grumbling.  I always thought of it as a culture difference, my aunt growing up cherished with three brothers on a northern prairie homestead and my mother growing up the oldest of four girls in the Willamette Valley in a conventionally religious family.  The paternal aunt’s family, when I raised the subject in recent years, thought I was implying something indecent, almost a sexual competition, because it was partly based on my father and his aunt having a kind of child romance — that he was her hero and protector.  He missed that admiration.  

When my mother died, I became the keeper of the family photograph archive, created by my father.  He also enjoyed the family’s opinion that he was a brilliant college man who knew classical music, played chess, and took photos. As I sorted and shifted them to digital images, I saw that his mother, my grandmother, had a major goiter on her neck, the most obvious sign of iodine deficiency.  The thyroid is a subtle but crucial organ in body regulation.  A bit of research and deduction, and I realized that this was the reason the family moved to Portland where the ocean provides lots of iodine in the food.  It worked and her goiter diminished.

Research on the effect of near-starvation in Holland during WWII has shown that the change in body chemistry that is triggered can be traced down the generations from grandparents to grandchildren, recorded in the epigenome.  The tendencies probably amount to a novel-worthy unrolling of what seemed to be personality traits coming down through the years.  

I suspect that because the effect began with my grandmother and had later possible impact on her daughter, her granddaughter, and possibly her great-granddaughter, means that it’s on the X chromosome, which they have as XX.  But even my father, XY, seems to be slightly influenced.  It’s hard to tell with him because of the impact (literally) of a concussion in a car accident that caused a personality change.  But his heredity must have some effect on me because he and I are the only fat people.

My mother’s XX seems to have been unaffected by anything I can detect, but both my brothers were slightly atypical, and one also had a concussion that crippled his brain.  Both were Marines,  both earned college degrees, and only one married.  The other one had a daughter outside marriage, though he was devoted to the child as long as he was allowed access and we've found each other now.  My mother said she married our father for his good teeth and eyes, but none of us inherited them.  We're about the same smart but with different results, maybe traceable to their choice of Benson Polytechnic High School for boys.

My marriage was only an interval inside a long relationship and I actively resisted pregnancy.  I am solitary.  I have three degrees: BS, MA, and MDiv.  As Hanna Gray put it when she handed me my MA diploma, they were “hunting licenses” — often hunting myself.  Both boys sort of fizzled out. I've been baffled about why. Why did our family of cousins disperse?

The family on my father’s Scots/Canadian/Dakota side, were masters of presenting themselves.  They were not church-goers, but idealistic about national identity and governmental support and protection.  Rural granges were their churches. My paternal grandfather was well-educated in Scotland and was superintendent of schools in South Dakota.  

On the cusp of the industrial revolution that changed from horse-based energy to machines, they were doing well raising potatoes and selling farm machinery, but then were undercut by WWII which nevertheless improved some fortunes, like the ship-builder uncle and bomber/transport pilot uncle.  Anyone meeting them casually would consider them typical achieving and honorable Americans.  Certainly my mother was.

Both her sisters married brothers, prosperous ranchers respected in their communities for generations.  They did not go to church but they did not drink, smoke, or gamble.  One taught her three daughters to marry well, but unfortunately one lawyer husband died young.  The other thrived and was a community asset.

The other aunt had served in WWII as an army nurse in London and Rheims, sustaining damage from intense smog and other possible second-hand effects.  Her four children have had varied stories.  The daughter had an extra toe and the daughter's son had a “club foot” but became a brilliant scientist.  Other close family in that line but with no war history have had missing thumbs and so on.  The name “Hatfield” seems to be confused with Hartsfield which is an inherited mutation of extremities, but it does seem to travel with the Hatfield name as well.

A Hatfield cousin not related to me had no thumb, but the surgeons transplanted her toe to her hand and it works well.  Though surgery made things “normal”, my cousins seem to have a sense of being secretly different and a special concern about how they seem to society, a willingness to accept the slightly shady in order to be prosperous.  Still, none is a church-goer, the girls have graduated from college, and all are hard-working.  They have blocked me out of their lives.  I do not seem prosperous to them.  Maybe irresponsible.

The questions that are raised by all this are things like what to do about the high social value of family solidarity that was American before the immigrants made it even more intense.  What are the obligations of a writer to originating family?  How much secrecy and disguise is actually moral and protective?  What about the children and grandchildren of the cousins I grew up close to?  I can’t even name them.

I disclosed the main patterns of my Sixties marriage and the genealogy of my husband, with some hints of more than what appeared on the surface, but he was an “artist” and considered a public figure already.  In fact, as it turned out, the community knew secrets about him that I had no idea about.  On a rez everyone knows everything.  Some didn't tell me until after they read "Bronze Inside and Out" to see whether I already knew.  Some things I probably never will know.  Except no one had much interest in me and most of what they knew about me has been outdated.  Many crucial things happened to me since my years in Browning.  People here don't read.  "Divinity School" means nothing.  They know bible college.

My family on both sides buys into “capitalism” as the moral center of life.  Only female cousins on my Scots paternal side pay any attention to my writing or understand my interest in “religion.”  Yet one paternal aunt by marriage was a published poet, popular among magazine readers.  A great-aunt on my mother’s side is a fine painter of still-lifes.  Within their media they were both far more conventional and sentimental than me, but charming and skillful. 

The most careful conformity can be disrupted.  I’ve felt protected by education from any prohibition or danger resulting from wandering wild fields.  But feeling alone is not enough.  Examination and reflection are demanded.  In times like our present multiple crises it's all more intense.

1910 IN CLARENCEVILLE, QUEBEC, A QUIET PARADISE

The grandparents of Doug Macfie on their wedding day.

"Nina and Robin"

Genealogy on the family scale can be framed in many different ways: a story of triumph, an explanation of tragedy, or occasionally the connections turn up a portrait of a specific time and place that isn’t so much a crisis as a portrait of paradise, a dream world we don’t want to give up.  Such an instance is a little town outside Montreal, Quebec, in 1910, where one summer my future mother-in-law, poised on the lip of adulthood, was visited by cousins from Missouri, one of whom kept a journal and wrote letters home.

Rufus Horatio Creller married Emily Bush.  They built the Clarenceville house that became known as the Macfie homestead and had five children.  In 1910 it was occupied by George Hawley Macfie who had married Josephine Orpah Creller.  These were the maternal grandparents of Bob Scriver.  Their children were Ellison Westgarth Macfie (b. 1887) and Robert Eugene Macfie (called “Robin”, b. 1885).  (Bob’s paternal grandparents, the James A. and Mary Scriver owned the adjacent dairy farm.)  Doug Macfie is Robin’s son.

Doug Macfie is the head of the Canada Clan Macfie and a cousin of Bob Scriver, to whom I was married in the Sixties.  In the past few years he has left Quebec and moved to Calgary where he is consolidating family papers.  It is he who sent me transcripts from the daughter of Franklin Truman Creller who beame a wealthy industrialist and developer in Joplin, MI.  This was a time when America was booming, largely due to land development on various frontiers.

There were no airlines yet so cousin Alice and her companions, Gertrude and 3-year-old son Addison, are traveling by railroad and riverboat, which is lucky since their luggage is trunks — not carry-on.  There are complex management issues over tickets, reservations in hotels, temporary storage of trunks while taking side expeditions, and so on.  Sometimes there are long walks between venues.  Rests are necessary!  The records are about weather, food, and scenery, which is mostly picturesque.

The War of 1812, which settled the ownership of the area as part of the British Empire, created a dynamic society of Native American tribes, French, and Englishmen remaining, content not to look to America.  These Clarenceville families were Anglophone in a French context left from before the political shift.  It was a time of British Empire consolidation, with a feel rather like India, but it has not been explored in film as far as I know.  Hired help was likely to be French and I think for Wessie that translated to Blackfeet when she got to Browning as a newlywed.  It did fit with the Metis people seen as “Cree” who were seeded through the Blackfeet world.

Quebec has always been a volatile province, but the families of Wessie and Alice were prosperous middle-class people, Edwardians of confidence in a time when women had parlor skills and men took their cigars aside to make deals.  Think “Anne of Green Gables” meets “Downton Abbey” with hints of “Room with a View.”  (But no Roman history and passion.)  At 23, Wessie was flattered by the attention of Thaddeus Scriver, youngest son, who had gone to Browning in 1903 in order to make his fortune but who was rather expected to return for Wessie and would do that in 1911.  

Alice has no such expectations, but the cousins are confident and joyful.  Alice repeats over and over how much fun “Ellison” is.  (She was always known as Wessie to friends in Browning.)  She’s physically fit, loves to run and could beat anyone in a footrace,and plays tennis in the family’s own court.  But the girls most of all love music — naturally they can play the piano — and Alice has gathered up a lot of duets to bring along so they can play in the evening.  Ellison sings and plays well enough to be asked to perform at events and church.

Alice is a small person who was taken into the family as help when her parents died and developed into an indispensable mainstay.  During the stay of the cousins, she goes to visit faraway relatives, so the girls take over her duties of cooking and laundry.  This is seen as fun because Alice can try Missouri recipes that the family doesn’t know and because the Macfie’s have a mechanical washing machine that makes the job easier.  Still, it can take several days to wash everything if one includes the ironing.  There must be two set-ups as they iron alongside each other as they chatter and sing.  When everything is clean, they go for walks and on visits or picnics.  It’s a simple, energetic life and no one complains that there’s nothing to do.

Addison provides anecdotes.  Observing cows being milked, which he hasn’t seen before, he worries that the poor cows’ teats might be pulled off and then wonders where they will get more milk to store up inside.  

During these late summer months, Josephine — Wessie’s mother — is ill enough to be bed-ridden and weak.  She eats nothing but egg whites and loses twenty pounds.  It’s a worry, but the cousins fill the vacuum and formally “visit” her bedroom to keep her informed.  This is before refrigeration, so perhaps it’s a kind of food-poisoning.  As a mature woman Wessie was plagued with diverticulitis.  The women take their handwork up to the bedroom to do while talking over events and neighbors.

As a side comment, Thad Scriver’s mother was a frail, artistic woman, much loved, who brought two boys to term, but then lost several pregnancies too early to be viable.  Thad himself was premature and grew up to be a small but tough man.  I feel sure that he was thinking of a good healthy mother when he chose Ellison.  She had no trouble with pregnancy and birth.  The culture shift from the graceful life of Clarenceville to the dusty, windy, fragmented reservation was hard on her, but she coped.  She had a piano but I never heard her play it.

I’d better include a quote:

“After dinner we all took a nap, that was always Aunt Josie’s orders, so today we were all glad to listen to the suggestion.  Ellison and I would softly slip out and do something.  One afternoon she and I went across the road and through the gate and down the road by the barn and as we stood by the fence, Ellison began to whistle and here came two of the most beautiful bay colts I have ever seen.  They just looked like twins, each had a white mark on his forehead.  Their tails almost touched the ground and their manes were so thick and beautiful.  Ellison talked to them and gave each one a lump of sugar and they just frisked around and were so happy.  I never saw anything so sweet and when we left they both whinnied at us.  We waved and told them goodbye.  I think they get lonesome and are happy to see someone.  Ellison said they were going to put them to carriage the next year or so.

“After each one had their nap, we sat down to a card game.”  

Then she reports that the phone rang and they were invited to a dance.  The trip home was in mid-October so they had to acquire a few warmer clothes.  I don’t know whether the trip was ever repeated, but perhaps they attended Wessie’s wedding the next year.

Wessie’s son “Robert” or Bob, had a daughter named Margaret who had a daughter named Michelle who had a daughter named Whitney who reminds me very much of Wessie.  She is an investigator for the Humane Society of the United States.  I’ll send her this.

Doug reminds me that his father is Murray who is the son of Robin and Nina.  

A NOT SO WAY-BACK SET OF GENEALOGIES

Among my papers I found this handful of genealogy exercises from Browning High School, probably in the early Seventies.  They are old enough that the worksheets were printed in that wretched purple alcohol-based stuff.  You could get drunk running off stuff in the mornings.  "Ditto", I think.

I'll just post these without much comment.  Some of the names draw a blank, while others are still part of my life.  I evidently hand-copied these from their originals which I presume went home with the students.  I'll put their names on in case you can't read them.  I have no idea who was enrolled and who was not.  I couldn't find a photo of Cecil Crawford in the 1972 Etakaisi, which is the only yearbook for that group that I have.  They were sophomores.

Boyd Evans

Lila Walter

Boyd and Lila married and are grandparents.

Here's Lila now.

John Babcock

Cecil Crawford

(no photo)

Diana Kennedy

Peggy Knudsen

Raymond Cobell

Robin Patterson

Rhonda Patterson

Terry Moore

Lynette Bouma

There were no charts for the following students, but they were in the same year of school.

Craig Wellman

Gail Hoyt

Forrestina (Frosty) Little Dog

Here she is now:

FINDING FAMILY

CATHY FINNEY has a business, though this page is for her son. 

Your Creative Memories Consultant

http://www.mycmsite.com/sites/cathyafinney

503-704-9583 and 503-829-2440

More than we had thought about who we are as individuals is due to genetic meshing in our very cells and the adding of the epigenes through environment, including the emotional environment, and then more adding of more factors through the acquiring of gut biota. More is added by our education, our experiences (chosen or not), our partners, our ecological location, our group affiliations, our work, the families we make, and our spiritual aspirations.

Key to what one does about all this stuff might be the strategies one uses to reconcile the “composite identity”.  Surely to some extent we all have a variety of personalities within us, each to be called out by certain situations unless one’s prefrontal cortex is severely compromised, since that’s evidently where these various roles are conflated or separated.  One can try to find some over-arching sense that includes all the others, assign a primary role to just one, render some of the identities unconscious, arrange them in a kind of priority set.  Or you can bug out to a new context where no one knows you and you have the freedom to reinvent yourself.  Of course, biological growth will force a person to a new identity, for instance from the adrenarche to puberty.  How that happens is a major imprinting shift.  So is a new intellectual capacity in the early twenties which can capture a person for the rest of their lives.  The new capacity may be LESS than one thought.

I’m thinking about this partly because of a doctoral candidate in Canada, Elliott Hanowski, making contact because of blog posts of mine about my grandparents, Beulah and Sam Strachan.  He wrote:  “I'm researching the history of the Winnipeg Rationalist / Humanist Society (1926-1940) as one section of my dissertation. I've been trying to get a sense of the people who made up the membership. In the course of that work I came across a letter from Sam S. Strachan on the official letterhead for his Kovar equipment business in Brandon. It's dated 1929. He wrote to Marshall Gauvin, the lecturer who ran the Society, to order two books on rationalism. He and his wife (listed simply as "Mrs. S.S.") also show up as dues-paying members of the Society in 1930. If I understand your posts correctly, they were your father's parents? Out of curiosity, can I ask if you know anything about their religious practice (or lack thereof) in later years?”

Besides answering Hanowski, I created an email list of cousins.  In came a quick set of responses.  One of the most interesting was from a woman who married into the family of Beulah Finney Strachan, as Cathy was preparing a wedding album for her own relative.  Sam and Beulah were indeed “Prairie Humanists” which sometimes affiliate with Unitarians.  They appear to have understood this point of view -- preoccupied with social reform and respectable behavior without addressing any anthro-theos or joining a church -- as secular, compartmented away from religion.  Or rather, from an outside point of view, their cathedrals were the grain elevators and their congregations were the granges.  The closest they came to religion was visiting national monuments, both natural (Grand Canyon) and industrial (Hoover Dam).  They were Progressive but never achieved real prosperity because of drought, Depression and WWII.  They lived on the Canadian prairie but not as long as they lived in South Dakota.  Late in life they came to Oregon, you could say “looking for Beulah Land.”

The children of Sam and Beulah continued their near-Methodist respectability but didn’t relate to church except to send the children to Sunday school.  The exception is myself, because of my mother, who was the daughter of a contentious Presbyterian man and a gentle Baptist woman.  My brothers slipped away early, but I took religion very seriously -- so seriously that thinking took me right on out of the Presbyterian church of my girlhood, then to a small town Methodist congregation mixed with Blackfeet ceremonies, then to an urban Unitarian church, on to the ministry and out the other side.  I am not like anyone else in my family that I know of.

The “composite” identity bind is that I live in an ascetic way, alone, and yet have intense relationships with people so unlike me that I could never live with them.  Even visiting friends, sharing their way of being even for a few days, is painful.  If they are so ill-advised as to come visit, they are upset and even scandalized.  They arrive with bottles of wine and expect to go shopping, not to have a geology lesson.  My true family is a chosen one, not genetic, and yet I’ve been a collector of genetic family information and a maker of connections.  

My genetic family on my father’s side wants to know, defend and confirm their virtue, to claim their relatives.  My genetic family on my mother’s side doesn’t want to know.  They are a ferocious quarreling bunch, some churchy and some not.  They throw each other out, mostly over wealth in the form of land.  Since my mother was one of a set of four women who married three men from the same family (she was the hold-out), there is a third family’s dynamic which is the most problematic of all but the best material for a generational saga.  Still, that third family did not drink, smoke, curse, gamble, go dancing, play cards, spit, or get into fist fights.  

The entering wedge of my nonconformity was obviously my father’s interest in near-socialism (co-operatives), his love of books and his secret interest in sexuality (which he mostly just read about as near as anyone knows).  But one should not neglect my mother’s religiosity and her love of Indians and “the Orient”.  Where my parents converged was in the belief that there was a kind of sophistication and superiority in education.  Both taught at one time or another.  Our house was loaded with books.  My father played classical music records.  Both were interested in politics.  But they didn’t even suspect the world I entered when I started college and certainly not the U of Chicago Divinity School world where I attended in mid-life.

NU provided religious sophistication -- philosophical.  The theatre world, like jazz music, is an accepting one and included nonconformity and individual toughness as high values.  Drama was a high value, so maybe it wasn’t surprising that I sought such a dramatic place as Browning, Montana, where tragedy mixed with comedy every day.  My in-laws were very much like the Strachans, but their two sons had been seized and changed.  One traumatized by WWII and the other a sculptor.  

The great afflictions of families have always been death in childbirth, alcoholism, war, and madness.  None of these families escaped.  The difference is in how they were treated.  Most simply denied and excluded the problematic people.  Counselors advise that one cannot control what happens, but CAN and SHOULD choose reactions on sound principles, not excluding simple survival.  

It’s grandiose narcissism to say so, but I’m looking for the excluded: the dead, the wicked, the addicted, and other stigmatized people, because it is an intellectual principle that the gaps are as important a source of information as the known.  It gets worse: I claim the whole planet as family.  Not just all living creatures.  The grass is my lovers’ hair.