Dear Diary

My grandmother, whom I never knew, kept a diary beginning in 1938 while she was confined in a tuberculosis sanitorium in Colorado.  Her hand-written recordings were brief, and run the gamut from descriptions of her poor health on a particular day to what someone else was wearing as they left the property.  She also commented on letters she received from friends and relatives back home in Arkansas.

I found this entry particularly interesting.  She wrote on Monday, September 26, 1938, "Listened to Hitler from 12 to 1:30.  Wonder if it means war.  Temp 101 at 1 o'clock but 100 3/5 at 2:30." I pondered what it was like to listen to Hitler, through a translator I presume, for an hour and a half.  I also felt her desperate hope when her temp had declined by a mere 2/5 of a degree.

She didn't fill in every day's entry, and in October 1938, she started writing about how discouraged she was becoming about her lack of improvement. On October 18, she wrote, "Have about reached the point where I can't hope much longer." Then on October 19, after talking with a pastor, a nurse, and a doctor, she "decided suddenly to go home.  Panicky & frightened."  Her notes say she left on the 5:15 pm train on Friday, October 21.  And that was her last entry, although she lived for another 17 months.

Then in 1942, my mother, who would have been 16, began writing in the same diary.  She was now living with her aunt and uncle who were her guardians, as her mother's death left her completely orphaned.

My mother's entries span 1942 and 1943, and are typical of what you might think a 16-year old would write:

• Music:  "Listened to Hit Parade--White Xmas is still 1st";
• Movies: "Saw 'Star Spangled Rhythms' after school"; "Saw 'My Gal Sal' with Rita Hayworth and Victor Mature."  Throughout she recorded many more movies and the stars of those movies.
• Friends:  "Nell blew her lid at noon because of something Bernice said.  Nothing else much."  I don't know who Nell was, but from other entries, she must have been quite a hot-head, as my mother remarks frequently about Nell being mad about one thing or the other.
• School: "A very dull day.  Gym starts - dancing and exercise- Mon & Wed.  Was elected Red Cross Rep." And "Had lecture on vulgarity of generation."  But in a sign of the times, she also wrote in different entries, "had practice air raid"; "everybody out on scrap metal hunt"; and "gas rationing today".
• Family: This remark made me laugh, so typical of a teenager even today:  "Damn Uncle Bud.  He wouldn't let me go to the USO Dance.  I hate him."   Uncle Bud died before I was born, but his wife, Aunt Edna, was a dear, dear person, and while she couldn't replace my grandmother in my mother's life, she was a fantastic stand-in.  She outlived my mother. 

I do plan, as time permits, to transcribe all the entries from both my grandmother and mother.  They tie me to my relatives, and give me insight to their lives, emotionally and historically.

2019--Week 6 Surprise...I'm pregnant!

I doubt this is what my mother said when, at age 20 and unmarried, she realized that she was pregnant.  I suspect it was more like, "Oh, *#!  I'm pregnant."  There are a lot of unknowns around the circumstances of her first pregnancy, and she died without ever sharing her secret with me.

What we do know is that she traveled from her small city in Louisiana to Dallas, TX, where it appears she lived for a while with the childless couple who would become the adoptive parents of her baby.  We believe she was connected to this couple by someone in Louisiana, as the couple had lived there prior to moving to Dallas.  After her baby girl was born, she went on to El Paso, TX, to live with a friend. And if she timed her travel just right, no one in Louisiana would have known she was pregnant, unless she had chosen to tell them. Going to El Paso afterwards where she was unknown would also keep her secret safe. We believe we know who the father was, confirmed by DNA matches with my niece, the daughter of my mother's first daughter, and my co-conspirator in trying to piece this together.  We don't know with 100% certainty why my mother didn't marry the father, whom we believe was not yet married.

Surprise does not even begin to describe my reaction when I stumbled upon my mom's secret through my genealogy research and, ultimately, DNA testing.  I mentally floundered trying to think of any living relatives to whom I could turn for enlightenment.  However, my mother and most of her cousins who might have known her secret were all deceased.

My niece was just as surprised when I emailed her late one April night in 2016, because based on research done by one of her relatives, she thought I was also deceased.  So we approached each other somewhat cautiously.  I confirmed my identity by sharing with her information that only a close family member would know.  She confirmed her relationship to my mother, her grandmother, by sharing copies of her mother's adoption papers and  birth certificate.  A close match with our DNA tests sealed our familial connection. 

My niece shared as much as she could remember about her mother.  Sadly, she was only 8 years old when her mom passed away suddenly from a heart attack at age 41, leaving a husband and 3 young children.  Evidently, my sister had a history of heart disease, and had begun searching for her birth mother several years prior to her death, which led her to legally open her adoption records.  

In my estimation, my mom had a couple of distinguishing features that made her beauty stand out.  She had big soulful hazel eyes, black hair with a widow's peak, and full lips upon which she wore the reddest of lipsticks.  When I looked at the photos of my sister, also beautiful, I couldn't see my mother in her features.  (Of course, my face is almost literally 1/2 of my father, and 1/2 of my mother.  And my coloring is neither.  DNA's like that, right?)  Nevertheless, as my niece shared more and more photos of her mother I started to see a resemblance, especially if her head was tilted a certain way.  And then I could see she had my mother's jawline.

I realize other people have been confronted by surprises like this through their DNA testing.  I wish for them the best of experiences in handling the emotional turmoil such a revelation will most likely cause, not only for themselves but for those around them as well.  My own immediate family has been supportive of me, and welcoming to our newly found relatives.  And our newly found relatives have happily accepted us ..... I think!

Leilani's senior picture circa 1965

My senior picture 1968

Mom circa 1945

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.

2019--Week 1--FIRST No More

I am the first and only child of my parents marriage. After they divorced, my father soon remarried and produced 5 more children with his second wife.  And although I didn't know those children as I was growing up, I knew I was the first and oldest. 

A few years ago as I began my genealogy research, the first thing I did was order a DNA kit from Ancestry.com. Of my four grandparents, 3 out of 4 were either first or second generation citizens. Only one had a long line of ancestors born in the US. I was anxious and hopeful to find some cousins who could help me learn more about the diverse backgrounds of my family. I anticipated the possibility of finding other offspring of my father's as he had a quite a reputation for being a ladies' man. 

So, on April 26, 2016, I logged on to my barebones Ancestry account and placed an order for DNA kits for my husband and myself. After I completed that task, I decided to take a look at my family tree and do a little research before turning in for the night. I noticed a "shaky leaf" on my mother's name, so I clicked on it. Her mother was one of ten children and I already knew there were cousins by the dozens who had Ancestry accounts, and I figured whatever clue was lurking was from this branch of the family. These connections were of little interest to me, as I had grown up hearing about the Littles and Wombles, most of whom had lived around the Arkansas-Louisiana state line since the mid 1800s.  I was far more interested to make a connection with my cousins who were descended from the Irish, Polish, or Mexican branches of my family. 

But to make the shaking leaf go away, I clicked on it, and went to the other family trees of people researching my mother's surname.  There was one family tree for someone whose name was not familiar to me, but, again, as the Little-Womble families branched out there were lots of unfamiliar surnames.  So I opened that tree and saw that it included my mother and father and me. However, the entry for me showed me as deceased, and having lived in Louisiana, a different Debra born also in 1950.  Further, there was another child born 3 years earlier than I, shown under my mother and a second unknown man. There was a birth index for the child's birth, and the mother's name was someone unknown to me. Someone had done some sloppy research just to fill out their tree, I opined. 

I whipped off an email immediately to the owner of the tree and informed her I was alive and well, and that I was an only child!  I pointed out the information from the birth index did not support her tree.   By now it was close to 11 pm, but I got a quick response from the owner, the now adult daughter of the second child.  She explained her mother had been adopted and the name on the birth index was the adoptive mother's name; the name on the original birth certificate was the same as my mother's. 

We exchanged a few more emails that night and the next day she posted the birth certificate so I could see it for myself.  My DNA kit could not get here soon enough!

You are warned when you buy a kit that there could be surprises in store. Sure enough, my DNA results matched with the owner of the tree, the highest DNA match I have.  I was supplanted as the first born.

Sadly, this newfound half sister passed away prematurely nearly 30 years ago as did my mother. But her daughter, my niece, and I have begun a nice friendship.  

Week 15: Taxes

My mother, who died in 1979, worked her entire life as a secretary/stenographer and, as an extension of those skills, left behind well organized files. Going through her papers for the umpteenth time, I stopped to look at the business sized enveloped labeled "Tax Returns", stuffed with Forms 1040 dating back to 1948, the year she and my dad got married.

I found it interesting, and sad as well, to see her salary progress from earning $3,200 in 1948 working for the Texas & New Orleans Railroad in El Paso, TX, and topping out in 1972 at a little more than $6,500 as a clerk for the federal government in Memphis, TN.  Such was the life for a divorced woman, a single parent with lots of smarts, but only a high school education.  It's also a statement about the time and place(s) where she lived too.

Perusing these tax returns, I learned where she and my dad worked in El Paso.  I found the addresses where they lived before I was born, and before they bought their first and only house together.  And from those addresses, I can deduce they bought their house sometime in 1953.  In 1952 they claimed a combined income in excess of $8,000, a very comfortable income for a small family of 3 in El Paso, I would think. Their earnings were only slightly less in 1953.  I learned that my mom usually earned more than my dad.

Then...(cue dark clouds and ominous music)...things went bad for them in 1954 and 1955. It looks like they filed a joint return in 1954, but the 1955 return is filed in my mom's name only.  The attached earnings statements were from El Paso, Seattle, and Memphis. My parents separated, then divorced in July 1955, with my mother removing us from the drama in El Paso and settling in Memphis where she had a very small network of cousins she could rely on for support.  Memphis was also a big enough city where she could easily find employment, as opposed to the small towns in Louisiana where she grew up.

Her 1956 tax return includes a typed explanation of why she claimed a deduction for license plates from both Texas and Tennessee, a result of my father not living up to his end of their property agreement.  I remember the event when that car, a two-tone 1954 Mercury, was repossessed on a weekend while I played out front and watched, incredulous, as a strange man went into the apartment building, then returned and drove away with our car!

I can see it took her 5-6 years to regain the earning power she lost when she left her job at the railroad in El Paso and went to work in Memphis for several of the oil companies that had offices there.  She also would occasionally work a half day on Saturdays to earn a few extra dollars.  I would oftentimes get to go with her to those Saturday jobs, and I would run the halls of the empty office building, where my footsteps echoed off the marble floors and high ceilings.  I would always beg for a nickel to buy a cold bottle of Coca-Cola from the vending machine downstairs, sometimes starting to badger her just as we entered the building.  If I could sit still long enough, I would marvel at her taking shorthand and transcribing her scratches on the steno pad to the typewriter with lightning speed.  I heard more than once about her outstanding secretarial skills.  I think I could probably match her typing speed, but I never mastered shorthand well enough to get close to her expertise!

In 1966, a friend referred my mom for a job with a Federal bankruptcy judge, who also happened to be the friend's father-in-law.  My mom had to take a cut in pay, but the benefits such as health insurance, were enticing. There were several additional W-2s attached to her 1966 return for side jobs she took.  The side jobs continued for another year or two, then stopped.  This may be because of the built-in "step increases" the government offered, so her salary increased a little every year.  Or perhaps the timing coincided with my starting college, where I was able to live at home and work on campus to cover all my expenses.  At the same time, her health began to decline, and in 1972 she qualified for a disability pension.

Even though her disability and Social Security incomes were less than she had earned her last years of working, it was sufficient for her to live modestly.  She certainly deserved those last few years of not having to struggle financially.

Charlotte Leary Moskal (circa 1964)

WEEK 4: Invite to dinner

After my parents divorced, my mother and I moved to Memphis, TN.  My mother, known as Miss Charlotte, "Miz" Moskal, or Aunt Charlotte (always pronounced like "aint" in that part of the south) was a wonderful cook, and continued to make the dishes she had learned to cook in El Paso from her Mexican mother-in-law, my grandmother, Papias.  

This must have been a seemingly exotic cuisine in the deep south in 1955, but with the exception of one ingredient, everything else she needed could be purchased at our corner grocery store: chili powder, cheddar cheese, onions, lettuce, ground meat, beans, rice.  

Interestingly, as I sat down to write about this, I dredged up a vague memory that for a while my Uncle Bill, her former brother-in-law, would ship us the corn tortillas, because that was the one critical ingredient she couldn’t find locally.  No tortillas; no Tex-Mex.  Whenever the tortillas arrived, we would feast that weekend. 

She made her enchilada sauce starting with a roux, then added chili powder and a few other ingredients, and this is the recipe she passed down to me.  She told me at the time that, while it wasn't the same recipe my grandmother used, it tasted pretty close to the way my grandmother's did.  I was astonished when I returned  to El Paso as an adult, and watched the steps my aunt went through to make her sauce, which involved roasting and soaking the peppers, undoubtedly more authentic, and a lot more work.  And anyway, I'm positive those peppers were not available from Franceschini's Grocery in the 1950's.

My mom made her own taco shells by folding the tortillas in half and holding the bottom in the hot grease until they hardened enough to be released to finish crisping. (No Old El Paso or Ortega pre-made shells back in the day.) To make the enchiladas, she would dip the tortillas quickly in hot grease just long enough to soften them before dousing them with her homemade enchilada sauce (red sauce only!).  Shredded cheese and chopped onions comprised the filling.  This was several hours of prep and cleanup, definitely no small feat for a single mom with a full-time job, who only had the weekend to accomplish many tasks.

Over time, many of my friends shared these meals with us, and of course, she would make Mexican food for our smattering of family who lived in Memphis.  It was always a special occasion when Miss Charlotte/Aunt Charlotte was cooking Mexican food.

I continued the tradition with my own family, and the choice of ingredients now seems limitless in this day and age, unlike my mom had to contend with. 

My family and friends will still occasionally remind me of those delicious meals, cooked with love, and I am always surprised, but especially grateful, that this is a happy memory for others who knew her. 

Miss Charlotte

My grandmother, Papias, making tamales