2019--Week 2--Charlotte's CHALLENGE

There are so many challenges in doing genealogy research, and my most enigmatic (so far) has been my maternal grandfather.  Since I could probably write just about every prompt about his life, and I've written about him several times this past year, I wanted to cover this writing prompt from a different angle.

My mother, Charlotte, was orphaned at age 13 when her mother, Ruby, died from tuberculosis.  Her father had died when she was just 2.  In reality, my mother had already been in the care of other family members for several years prior to her mother's death, while Ruby lived at the Modern Woodmen TB sanitorium in Colorado hoping for the best outcome. At least once, someone took my mother by train to Colorado to see her mother, and from what I can glean from my grandmother's diary, there was an expectation that my mother would stay and go to school there.  However, my mother was unhappy with that arrangement, and so she returned to her aunts and uncles in Louisiana.

Entry in Ruby's diary.  "Baby" is one of my mother's nicknames. She was also called "Gal".

Ruby writes about my mother's return to Louisiana.

Ruby is on the far right, snapped here with other patients at Modern Woodmen TB Sanitorium.

The death of my grandmother was something that my mother never got over, it seems.  Whenever she would get "blue", she would cry, and this devastating event would surface as one reason for
her low mood.

Over the years, she would occasionally get an inquiry from a distant family member who was interested in the genealogy of our family.  For whatever reason, my great Aunt Edna, who had been my mother's caretaker after Ruby's death, would always refer them to my mother, with the expectation that she had possession of a family bible. (She didn't.)

Digging through her mother's few belongings to attempt to answer whatever questions were posed to her was my mother's challenge.  In 1975, she wrote one cousin in response, "...the last time this came up...it tore me to pieces digging through the few papers of my mother's, trying to find any kind of record among the one scrapbook and the one picture album my mother left me...I cried and cussed on alternate days for 2 weeks".  Nevertheless, she wrote a 7-page typed response (with lots of colorful language), and added several hand written pages of a family tree.  As I compare her notes to the records I've found, I am amazed at the accuracy of her memory.

Let's try to remember as family historians that sometimes other people will have challenges, perhaps similar to my mother's, that will make it distasteful, or even traumatic, for them to share certain aspects of the past.