El Paso was more than 1,000 miles away from Memphis, and of course, in the 1950's ordinary people traveled mostly by car, or perhaps by train. My Nana didn't drive, and my mother, a single parent, couldn't afford for us to travel back to El Paso, and we didn't have a reliable car anyway. And upon reflection, my mom likely wanted to avoid an encounter with my dad and his new wife.
So in 1957, two years after our move to Memphis, my Uncle Bill, my dad's older brother, drove Nana to Memphis to see us. Following today's interstate highways, Google Maps calculates a 15-17 hour drive from El Paso to Memphis, but it's doubtful he was able to take a route as direct or as swift as that. Uncle Bill told me many years later that Nana sat in the back seat of his station wagon and said her rosary for the entire trip as he surely put the pedal to the metal to cover the miles as quickly as possible.
When they finally arrived at our apartment in Memphis, I remember being so happy to see them, especially Nana, and I was aware, for the first time in my life, that my cheeks hurt from smiling. She brought me holy water from her church, and let me pick among several scarves she had packed. She didn't care that I picked the most beautiful one. That was my Nana.
I don't recall how long they stayed, probably a week, since I'm sure Uncle Bill needed to get back to work, but he and his trusty Polaroid camera documented the visit for posterity. My mother cried when they left knowing somehow this would be the last time we would see Nana. However, Uncle Bill continued to stay in touch with us, and would occasionally visit, until his death in 1995.
When I started my genealogy research, I thought because I knew my grandmother, that I knew quite a bit about her. I knew she was born in Mexico, and that she was a devout Catholic who attended mass everyday. But I really knew nothing. Somewhere along the way, either my uncle or my cousin, Anita, (his daughter) had given me a copy of Nana's birth certificate. It was invaluable as a starting point, because in Mexico the births recorded by the church included the names of parents as well as grandparents, a great start for our family tree.
Nana was born in February 1888 according to her official birth certificate, but as I researched further, it amused me to see that on her marriage certificates and census records, she took liberties with her birth year, stating she was born either in 1892, 1894, and 1896. I wonder if my grandfather ever knew she was actually seven years older than he was.
I learned from Anita's research that our grandmother had actually married a man named Juan Beltran in 1913 prior to marrying our grandfather in 1920. She and Juan married in El Paso, and I presume, although I don't know for sure, that she had left her town of Casas Grandes because of the Mexican revolution as many Mexicans from Chihuahua fled to the U.S. We don't know what happened to Juan. There is a Juan Beltran named in several newspaper articles who fought with Pancho Villa, but I'm doubtful that would be the same person. It's hard for me to grasp that Nana and Juan might have divorced, given her deep religious convictions, at least from my vantage point (see rosaries and holy water above!). But men named Juan Beltran seems endless and I've not yet located a death certificate that fits that timeframe.
That distance of 1,000+ miles was a real impediment to learning first hand of my grandmother's family history, given the lengthy mode of travel and the prohibitive costs of long distance phone calls back in the day. I know it would have been fascinating to hear about her childhood in Mexico with brothers and sisters and cousins too numerous to count. Like many of us family researchers, I wish I could ask these questions now.
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| Nana and (silly) me, Memphis 1957 |
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| Nana and me circa 1953 |
