Gone and Back Again

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During my childhood I spent the largest portion of my summers with my Nanny. For an active, compact woman of only 5’2”; she had a big opinion, a big mouth, and an even bigger bank of stories and lore to pass along. While many twelve year olds would have much preferred hanging out with their friends at the pool during the summer (I feel as if I did plenty of that, as well) I did prefer being with her during the long summer days. From her I learned some of the most relevant and random information known to man.

I can tell you when to plant corn (when the leaves on the trees are the size of a squirrel’s ear—as they are right now). I can tell you what fish prefer to worms on the line (family secret). I can tell you that if you give a teething baby a frozen dill pickle to gnaw on, you should tie the pickle to a string that is attached to the baby’s wrist—if they choke they automatically flail their arms and that would pull whatever they have in their mouth out of their mouth. She showed me how one can smoke a cigarette, drink a cup of coffee (before cup holders), shift gears and still keep a hand on the steering wheel. I can tell you so many things like this that if there were Olympics for arcane Ozark survival trivia today, I would win. I soaked it all up. I idolized her, and still do.

The summer I was twelve was the last good summer that I had with my Nanny. The following summer she would be out of her mind on pain medication, at home on hospice, destined to slip away from us in the night before her birthday. I helped to care for her in her final days.

During that summer, we traveled all over four states following the lore of her family. It was as if she knew something was going to happen that would keep her from telling me as I was older (and she was a nurse, after all, so maybe she did know). That, and the fact that her sister was looking to get herself back on the role.

For those who are not certain what the role is—it’s the official list of tribal members and it gives its members certain rights. Rights to commodity cheese, for instance. Rights to minority scholarships (you see, Native Americans have to prove their race, whereas Latinos and African Americans can just state it). Many individuals these days have no desire to be on only tribal role. I have no desire to ever be on a role.

Because records concerning Native Americans (or Indian Territory) are often “lost,” destroyed, inaccurate, or completely false, it was a momentous journey that summer. We visited the places important to her family—people who were five generations or more removed from me. And she relied on the stories. From the stories of her childhood (sledding down the chat piles that would eventually force an entire town to be evacuated due to lead contamination) to cemeteries to safety deposit boxes to circuit clerk offices. She pieced it together and all along the way told me the stories of the individuals we were tracking down. I could fill a book with those stories.

But after her death, and as I grew into adulthood, I began to lose those stories. I couldn’t remember her mother’s name, who died when my Nanny was ten. I couldn’t remember which ones had come from which places before Indian Territory. I began to feel panicky about it in my early adulthood (how could I pass this along to my children if I was losing it myself?) and realized that I could not recreate it. I couldn’t remember enough of the facts—just the stories. And the records—well, many of these records had never made their way into genealogy centers or Ancestry.com.

Until now.

A coworker of mine is very big into genealogy. She’s always telling me to study my family, and finally, I admitted to her that I had tried, but the records were just not there for me to find—at least digitally. Yesterday, she surprised me by showing that many of those records have now been digitized, cross referenced with census data and posted online. She knew some of the family names (I had shared them with her, because her church has a family history center) and she had started for me. 

She had found my Nanny. Her parents. Their parents and their parents, and so on. And I have my Nanny’s mother’s name again.

Back until the 1850s. Which I never thought was possible. I watch family members through the census (1880, 1900, 1910, 1920) change from black and mulatto to white (a common practice amongst enumerating Indians). I see where my Nanny’s paternal grandfather was adopted at the age of eight and given an agent’s name. I see it all, and the stories start to flood back.

Although, some of the stories don’t match what I was told. This was disconcerting in the first moment I realized it, but I’ve been told repeatedly (now and before) that this is common. So, I will embrace it, and try to reconcile the stories against the records. There are reasons why the stories arose the way they did, and there are reasons why the records state what they do and the goal, in my mind, is to find the links between the two.

Because now I have the two, and that was a feeling I never thought I would experience again. You do not know the power that your ancestors and your family’s past holds upon you until you have lost some piece of it. To have it returned to you—I cannot even begin to describe the feeling.