Thursday, April 29, 1999

May 19, 1999

Wednesday, March 8, 2000

Finding dates on documents and studying the events and languages that outlined the lives of my ancestors is only the beginning.

I lie in bed at night, enchanted by these hard but shadowy facts. Here, in the half-light of falling asleep, the date on a birth certificate and the sponsor at a baptism weave together with a father’s occupation and the number of surrounding siblings. Slowly the life emerges of a woman I am beginning to know better.  Who she was named after, who stood on either side of her as she signed the register of a ship’s passenger list, these things I learn gradually as she comes to trust my interest in her life. The earlier marriage of her husband, the witnesses at their wedding, the births and deaths of their infant children, the untimeliness of a parent’s death suggest to me only deeper hidden “unrecordings” that I have yet to learn. As I fall asleep, I wonder what these unrecordings might be. Sitting in small groups around my bed, conversing among themselves in rhythms I can just barely sense are true feelings and unrecorded facts just beyond my reach. They keep an eye on me as I fall into sleep. They wait for an opportunity to come–sometimes in pairs–to my bedside, adjust my blankets, and slide deeper into my understanding. Here in this realm of fact and of unrecorded things, in this realm of careful watching and of sleep, I gather new information.

1. Dorethea Wild was married in June 1815 just days before the Battle of Waterloo in a little town called Monzigen on the Nahe River in the Rhineland Pfalz area, west of the Rhine. She did not grow up in this town. She was born and her family lived in Oberstein. Permission from her mother had to be obtained so that she could marry Casimir Gretsch, a widower who was born in Monzigen and was a butcher in Simmern. Dorethea signed her wedding certificate. A talent not many women possessed at that time.

1. What was Dorethea Wild doing in Monzigen? She is listed on the marriage certificate as “ohne profession.” She wasn’t working. Was she visiting a sister or brother and helping to take care of their children when she met the young Gretsch widower and his two daughters Elizabeth and Julia? 

Or perhaps Dorethea knew Elizabeth Auler , the first wife of Casimir Gretsch?  Perhaps there two women were great friends? 

Dorethea must have remained close to her stepdaughters. When she died in 1850, she was living at the home of her stepdaughter Elizabeth and her husband Peter Schneider.

2. Did Dorethea spend time walking in the hills and woods around Simmern with her own four-year-old daughter Dorethea Catherina and her stepdaughter’s young teenagers in the fall of 1820 after the deaths only days apart of her two year old daughter and 3 year old son?

2. My great-great grandmother Anna Maria von Gerichten was the oldest of ten children. She married William Gretsch in 1852 and bore him 9 children. Each of her children were named in the same sequence as her own siblings had been named. Only one of her brothers was excluded from this honor, Conrad. None of Anna Maria’s children were named after him. Conrad was the fifth of Anna Maria’s younger siblings. He went to American and lived in California and moved back to Germany probably after Anna Maria died.

a) Why did Anna Maria’s copy this pattern naming from her mother? What does this tell me about Anna Maria’s relationship to her mother? Anna Maria lived in the same town as her mother and her mother died only 18 months before she herself died. There was only one other girl in the family, Philippine. Like Anna Maria, there is absolutely no information about her in the von Gerichten family history.  Perhaps like her older sister Anna Maria, there is a great-great granddaughter who is trying to imagine her life.  

b) If Anna Maria did in fact have the power to name her children in the same order as her siblings, what does this tell me about Anna Maria’s relationship to her husband? Was he not involved in the naming of the children. William, already having children from a previous marriage and a son named after himself, was perhaps content to leave this and other aspects of raising children to his wife.

c) What does this naming pattern tell me about Anna Maria’s relationship to her siblings? Being the oldest child, the only girl for 13 years, she its possible that she had a very powerful position in the family. Especially, after the father’s early death when Anna Maria was only 14 years old. 

d)What does she wish for her children by relating them so closely with her siblings in this way? Did she hope that her children would stay close to her family even though they no longer bore the surname? Did she hope to bond her siblings to her children in ways that were even closer that ordinary familiar ties?

e) Growing up without a father herself, she must have been keenly aware of the   importance of uncles and the impermanency of fathers.

3. I had been told all my life that my paternal grandmother was a very devout Catholic. She had raised her three sons to be all devout Catholics although her husband was not Catholic.Through documents, I discovered that she was married in her parent’s home by a Lutheran Minister. She was also been buried in a Lutheran Cemetery. Charlotte seemed to be following a pattern that was set by her mother Theresa Leicht Sommer. Theresa was married in a grand ceremony in the Lutheran Church in 1872 and buried in a Lutheran Cemetery in 1915. Yet Theresa had been a sponsor for Charlotte’s children when they were baptized in St. Gregory’s Catholic Church.

a) What was the relationship between Charlotte and her mother? Charlotte was the only daughter, as her mother had been the only daughter in her family. 

b) Charlotte, like Theresa, had her first cousin as a witness at her wedding.

4. My mother Maxine Sylvia Elsner Gretsch was dying in 1964 in the same bed, in the same room, in the same house, at the same age, of the same disease, that her mother-in-law Charlotte Sommer Gretsch died of in 1928. They had never met. They were both devout Catholics. They both had strong ties with the Lutheran Church and they both married Gretsch men.

a) What did they know about each other?

b) It would seem that they were setting up and following some invisible pattern for each other. A pattern that had something to do with their bodies? A pattern that had something to do with the men who they married? 

5. My mother was widowed just days before her 32^nd birthday. She had only been married five years and had four very young children. 

She decided to live with my father’s family and to bring their children up in a faith   that had not been her own but which she had converted to shortly before her marriage.

Her mother Hattie Helen Dieter married Max August Elsner on September 9, 1909.  The only extant wedding certificate has this quote:

“Wither thou goest, I will go and where thou lodgest, I will lodge, thy people shall be my people and thy God my God” Ruth 1.16

My mother must have known this quote from when she was a young child. She certainly mentioned it during a phone call that solidified her marriage negotiations with my father in late November 1942. Shortly after, he sent her a telegram: 

“Confirming our phone call the contract is for life. The place is California Missouri. The Date December 13, 1942. Read Ruth $25.40. Unsigned.”

Two days later, she answered by telegram:

“Shipment arrived splendid condition am thankful for you today. Forever=Ruth”

a) Seeing herself as Ruth, my mother was reiterating a pattern which her mother had endorsed by her own marriage but how?

b) Hattie Helen’s mother and her husband’s mother had been in the same church and were buried in the same cemetery.

c) As a very young girl, widows surrounded Maxine. Her mother’s brothers had died young leaving two young widows. What did that mean to Maxine who herself became a young widow…..and how was this echoed in the words of Ruth?

6. Regina Winklein Sommer was the first ancestor I found to come to America. She arrived on the “Defender” in June of 1837. She was 29 years old. However, it took me several years to learn of her youngest daughter Anna born in 1852.

a) Finding Anna and the connections between her and her mother taught me a lot about both women.

b) Who else haven’t I found in my searches? 

7. Finally and recently, I found a photograph of my mother’s grandmother Helen Barenz Dieter taken in her living room in 1939 in Joplin, Mo. She is 69 years old. She is sitting under huge oval portraits of her and her late husband. Off to the side is a similar large oval photograph of her youngest son, August. I recognize the photos of her and her husband. They are enlargements of a family photo taken about 1906. At that time the family was intact. In the next ten years, all three of her sons died.

a) What do I need to know about this woman and her life in order to know what she was thinking as she posed for this 1939 portrait.

b) Was she thinking of the woman who posed originally in 1906?

c) That woman was quite used to posing for pictures with her children. She wasn’t camera shy.

d) What was she thinking of herself in front of the camera?

How do I write about all this? After imagining them and their lives in their times, imagine them imagining their own lives: recreate their imaginations (i.e. recreate the depth of their lives from completely unrecorded records.)

For example: what they did to make their lives livable, 

what they did do to remember themselves and their lives in a world that would not remember them. 

They knew that the depth of time, the experience of their very existence, depended on them and their imaginations…and this depth they constructed in unrecorded ways.

Try to imagine how this imagining of themselves, this attention of the depths of their experiences (recorded yet unrecorded).

How their thinking about themselves showed up unrecorded.

How they taught their children: 

hand gestures, 

singing as they sewed,

how they stretched the flatness of recorded time to include them.

How, in creating this deeper sense of time, they reached beyond themselves and into the next generation also connecting with those who went before them.

Figure out how they passed this imagination or (forgotten).

Vanished perceptual and perceptual forms…..(I think this phrase is from [Barbara] Duden it certainly isn’t mine although it describes what I am thinking about).