The Box

Well, I started on The Box this afternoon - this was after I had a huge lunch of Japanese food with my former neighbor Erica who happened to be in my new neighborhood. So, rather than be lazy and lethargic I thought I'd tackle The Box.

This is something I've dreaded for months. The Box is a large file box filled with pictures, letters, mementos which I compiled during the past year while cleaning out my mother's house. Part of the dread comes from the emotions that naturally overtake me as I go through all this stuff. One emotion is a feeling of being overwhelmed - there are so many items and every one is important, if not to me, to someone in the family. Another emotion is responsibility - as the keeper of these items I need to make sure they are taken care of, scanned, loaded into the database to share with everyone. Another emotion is sadness - when I see pictures of Mom in her heyday, or pictures of her with her siblings. And finally, the greatest emotion is love - I have a family heritage which goes back many generations and those before me have taken care to save items, to document them, and to pass them on.

So far, I've organized all the memorial cards which were given out at various funerals - I will be scanning these soon and placing them here.

An Answer Back

Well, I didn't expect this so soon, but I received an answer back from an email to a long-lost cousin, so-to-speak. Earlier today I went through a folder of old family emails and tried to re-establish contact with some cousins that I've not heard from (or I've not tried to contact) in years. Mostly I just updated them on Mom's condition, where I am and what I am doing these days, and of course asking for some info on recent births, marriages, deaths, etc.

One cousin, Ronald Mulholland, who is actually my second cousin once removed, is someone I remember growing up. He is the son of my aunt Dorothy Austin Mulholland(actually my 1st cousin twice removed) who I remember fondly - we went to her huge house on Elm Place in the Bronx (more about the family home on Elm Place in a later post) and often saw her at my great-grandmother's house in Grahamsville during the summers. A photo of Ronald Mulholland with Catherine O'Keefe Austin c 1942 is shown above.

Well, I received an email response back from him in only a matter of hours! I did a search on Google and landed on an alumni site for Marist College where he went to college. Luckily they had an email address and I figured I'd give it a chance. Ron wrote me back and said he wondered why his mail to my mother kept getting returned.

Mom was very close to Aunt Dorothy - in fact while I was cleaning out the house this summer, I found a picture of the last visit Mom made to see her in Wheeling, West Virginia. Not soon after Aunt Dorothy passed away.

I remember all the older women in my family - Aunt Dorothy and her dog Tilly, Aunt Loretta McGinnes Murtha(my great-grandmother's sister) and her Parliament cigarettes, Aunt Ethel McCrickert

Hannan who lived in Ft. Myers, FL and many more. These women were wise beyond their years, very opinionated - which was cool, and really held the family and its traditions together. Gosh, I miss them.

The journey "re-begins"

I've chosen the word "re-begin" since I made quite a headway with my family's genealogy starting in 1998. I worked on this project for about two years and put it aside in mid-2000. So this blog is a way for me to make journal entries on my efforts to learn more about my family and perhaps more about myself.

I've always identified more with the Austin part of my family, mainly my mother's family. In 1998, Mom gave me a photocopy of a genealogy that the family had printed back in 1916. It is entitled "Genealogy of David Putman and His Descendants" and was compiled by George W. Putman. George W. Putman is my 2nd cousin 5 times removed and was born in 1838. It was fairly common in the first 20 years of the last century for families to research and print up their own family histories - partly in an effort to demonstrate that they were more "American" than recent immigrants.

My latest motivation to pick up this project again is somewhat personal but one that should be shared. Over the past six years, as my mother's Alzheimer's Disease has taken its natural progression, I have felt more and more separated from my family, despite more frequent trips back to upstate New York. In 2006, I made at least five trips to clean out my mother's house and to sort through 30 years worth of pictures, clothes, jewelry - the detritus of a life put on hold while my mother took care of her own grandmother and great aunt. But as my mother's world grows smaller day-by-day, I'm committed to expanding my own world of knowledge about her ancestors.

Ask any of her siblings, all nine that are still living, and they'll tell you about "Ma" and "Pa" - my great-grandparents John Ralph Austin and Therese McGinnes Austin. They were a big influence in my life and I had the privilege of knowing them before they passed on. They were strict, they were funny, they were very opinionated and rather conservative; they taught us the right way to hold a fork, how to say "please" and "thank you", how to handle many different social situations; they taught us how to get by and make a buck seem like a buck fifty, how to grow and can your own food, how to appreciate simple things like plumbing, electricity and telephone (do you remember their double-seater outhouse? or the 8-party line?). These are the people that we all thought about when at a family gathering we identified ourselves as "Austins."

The photo above is of John Ralph Austin at age 18 months.

So, with my new copy of genealogy software, my old database files, and a huge storage box of mementos, pictures, diaries, and notes, I'm off on the journey.