Jacques-Philippe Caresme:
Priest Making an Offering Accompanied by Nymphs and Satyrs
(18th century)

They Become More Real
I’m starting to believe that history might mostly be about patterns. Individual stories and actions might matter most when reduced to patterns. One instance might prove entertaining, but a half-dozen similar stories spread over centuries might better inform. I’ve been stumbling into possible crossovers, where one great-grandfather ended up in the same place and time as another and where every damned family that followed that trail ended up with almost the same story. These revelations shift my attention away from accomplishments toward responses. It might be that The Cumberland Valley, for instance, provided a context that tended to tease out the same behaviors from a variety of different people, that it might not have mattered what historical place your family hailed from or what religion they practiced, but that they fell under the subtle influence of a place they happened to share. I wasn’t there, but their stories sound more than accidentally similar. They almost seem like they were pulled from a book of valid plot lines or merely works of fiction. They become more real once they start showing their similarities.

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Weekly Writing Summary

In this Fambly Story, I attempt to explain why two of my great-grandfathers were named after AndrewJackson.

David Claypoole Johnston: Exhibition of Cabinet Pictures: Satire on Andrew Jackson (19th century)
" … this swirl of stories constitutes adequate justification …"
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This Fambly Story, *TrackingProgress, explains how I've been tracking my forebears' progress across the centuries and continents. I watch where and when they had their babies, and I can calculate a crude rate of their progress toward Oregon. This story proved the most popular this period!

Julius Gari Melchers: Mother and Child (c. 1906)
"This world moves exclusively in mighty mysterious ways."
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This Fambly Story combines all the threads and spokes of my mother's family history into an unlikely convergence point, GilliamCounty, Oregon.

Dorothea Lange: On transportation outskirts of a small Oregon town on the Columbia River.
Arlington, Gilliam County, Oregon (1939)
"Those churches held the records."
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This Fambly Story, Leaps&Bounds, introduces my paternal grandmother, Caroline (Carrie) Nettie Bounds.

Charles Bentley: The Leap, from Fox Hunting (1828)
"She ultimately came to carry even her trauma well."
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This Fambly Story explores some ways I feel BoundUp by the eccentricity of the data I have to work with when attempting to trace my genealogy.

Roman; Rome, Italy: Mosaic Floor Panel Depicting a Bound Rooster (2nd century)
" … so I almost fervently imagine."
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This Fambly Story finds me taking some SideTrips along my Fambly Tree just to see what I might see there.

Jules F. Jacquemart: Mementos of a Trip (1862)
" … they insist we were all created equal."
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I claim to be writing my Fambly history, but I’m writing mine in some ways. These glimpses feel awfully personal to totally be about anybody else. I suppose I subscribe to the popular fiction that behaviors might be inheritable. For instance, I discovered many years ago that my twice great-grandmother Maria Seward Kenastan Mayfield bought blank greeting cards for her loved ones and filled them with original poetry rather than relying upon store-bought sentiments to get her feelings across. I’d been doing that for decades when I learned that she also did that. I firmly believe that trait must have been inherited. There’s probably no way to tell. I notice parts of my Andrew Jackson Mayfields in my behaviors, too. I might TrackProgress by counting the number of such revelations my efforts produce. I was born in GilliamCounty, and though I only lived there for eight months when I was still an infant, I recognize quite a bit I must have inherited from my time in rimrock country, or from my forebears’ time spent there. I make these Leaps and Bounds, sometimes feeling BoundUp by then and distracted into engaging in seemingly innumerable SideTrips. I might just be up to discovering myself by the time I finish. Thank you for following along!
©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Fambly, #PureSchmaltz