OR Why Genealogy Is Important
Last month I wrote a blog about a ring that I gave my daughter. This ring was engraved with: OEM and MWW Apr 29, 1925. It was given to me by my grandmother, who received it somehow from a cousin, whose wedding ring it originally was. The reason we know this is that I consulted a crumpled paper copy of a family tree typed by a family member in the 1950s. It shows six generations of my maternal line. The two sets of initials on the inside of the ring match the names of two individuals in that family tree, and the date matches the marriage date also written in the family tree.
It so happens that after I described all that in my previous blog, a distant family member, let’s call him “D.,” contacted me by email. (I’m only using initials here.) Although I only see him but once in a blue moon and he lives in another state, come to find out he’s been reading Modern Memoirs’ blogs. Being one of the relatives on this family tree of my maternal line, he quickly deduced that the ring’s initials M.W.W. matched those of someone in his maternal line as well. He wrote to me how the “W.” name has been repeated down the line since his great-grandfather:
You probably don’t know that my second grandchild (age one) was named W. after my great-grandfather J.W.W. That fellow [hailing from Virginia, a Confederate soldier] was wounded in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg in the War Between the States. His life was apparently saved by an unknown Union cavalryman who ordered his men to lift him out of a puddle and set him up in the shade of a nearby tree. After the war, J.W.W. returned to his hometown in Virginia and fathered 10 children! One was my beloved mother’s father, T.L.W. We have a copy of J.W.W.’s manuscript of the action that day in Gettysburg.
Intriguing is an understatement. I consulted the family tree again and learned that D. is actually my grandmother’s cousin’s son, and I noticed some repetitions of the W. name down the generations. My rapid follow-up to his email: I’d love to read that handwritten account of Pickett’s Charge!
I don’t have much more to say than how valuable it is to write things down, not on a computer file that could be obsolete after some years or decades, but on paper, which can last centuries. Also, receiving my cousin's email made me realize how important it is to share family history with others. Although my daughter and I did some successful sleuthing on our own, turning genealogy into a collaborative effort can bring even greater rewards.
More to come… after I’ve read my relative’s handwritten account of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, 163 years ago.
Ali de Groot is director of publishing for Modern Memoirs, Inc.