Week 16 – Oldest Story

The fact I can trace my lineage back to Charlemagne is probably the oldest story in terms of time, but how that pertains to me personally – well, it really doesn’t. Charlemagne, the Father of Europe, Holy Roman Emperor, feels so far removed that it’s hard to comprehend that somehow, I descend from him.  I remember many stories told to me as a young child, so I thought long and hard to find the oldest story about my family history that I can recall. I came up blank.  As this is Easter week, I decided, instead, on a story about an Easter egg…

My paternal grandparents were not well off by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, I’m not sure they ever owned a home. My grandfather was an oily his entire adult life working and living in oil camps all over Texas and Oklahoma.  That being said, they never had a lot of “stuff”.  When my grandfather died in 1963, my grandmother moved to a small garage apartment just a few blocks from my parents.  It was a “studio” apartment with a full-size bed, couch, chair and coffee table in one room; the kitchen and dining area in another. Needless to say, she had very little storage space.  Except for her sewing machine and table, everything she owned fit into a closet which held a chest of drawers, a few shelves and a hanging rod.

Grandma Powers was born in 1890 in Hannibal, Missouri but raised in Moberly, where her father worked for the railroad.  She was twenty-three when she married my grandfather and left Missouri.  By the time their third child was born, in 1923, they had lived in Strawn, Ranger, Palo Pinto, and Eastland in Texas; Bartlesville, Muskogee, Newkirk, Shawnee, and Seminole in Oklahoma. These are the places I’ve managed to identify, but as they were in some places for a very short time, there could have been others.  It’s clear they wouldn’t have wanted to move a lot of mementos from place to place and kept their belongings to a minimum.

I spent every day with my grandma in the summers – whether it be at her apartment or travelling with her back to Moberly for a visit. She was my babysitter but also my mentor. She taught me to sew, crochet, garden and cook (yes, I can cook – I just choose not to). As the youngest of four children, my mother babied me, but grandma always talked to me like I was a grown up. I attribute this to the reason I matured faster than others my age. 

In Kindergarten, we had “Show and Tell” every so often and in discussing this with grandma just a few weeks before Easter, she miraculously produced an old glass egg.  Where this egg had been kept throughout all the years of moving around, and the fact it remained intact, has to be one of the wonders of the world. No matter how hard I try, I can’t think of where this family heirloom could have possibly been kept in her small apartment, but on this day, here it was.  She told me that she had received the egg on her twelfth birthday from her grandmother and that it was one of the very few things she still had from her early years (the others being crochet hooks, a thimble, and pair of small scissors).  This milk glass egg with the words “Easter Greetings” and flowers hand-painted on one side was the most fascinating thing I had seen in my lifetime, up until that point. It was made so by the fact that my grandmother was trusting me, a five-year-old, to hold this fragile item from her childhood.

She packed it in a shoe box with wadded up newspapers for support and off to Madison Elementary it went with me for “Show and Tell” the week before Easter.  My grandmother had entrusted it to me, but I recall letting classmates hold it. How it survived a bunch of Kindergarteners is nothing short of a miracle. After returning it to my grandmother, it stayed out of sight for several more years, until my twelfth birthday when she gave it to me for keeps.  As I was her last granddaughter, she told me I was responsible for passing it on to my youngest granddaughter when the time came. I found a cute little basket to display it in and it’s been with me throughout my adult life.

Just a few years ago, while looking through old newspapers, I stumbled upon an article from the Moberly Monitor Index in 1902.  It described the “Twelfth Birthday Anniversary” of Little Miss Henrietta Patton, my grandmother.  This would have been the occasion when the egg was presented to her.  Who could have imagined that the egg would have survived all these years and that one day, her granddaughter would read about the day in a 120-year-old society section article. Why an Easter egg was given to a twelve-year-old in July will remain a mystery until the end of time, but it’s legacy lives on. 

My youngest granddaughter turned twelve in 2023.  For her birthday, I passed “The Egg” (as my family calls it) on to her with the instruction to pass it on to her youngest granddaughter when the time comes.

Easter, to Christians, is observed in remembrance of the resurrection of Christ.  The egg symbolizes new life, rebirth and resurrection.  As we celebrate this week, let us also remember our ancestors. As family historians, we have the opportunity to breathe new life into and resurrect those that came before us by continuing to tell their stories. 

 

Happy Easter to each of you!