The Past, The Present and The Future

Ethan and I just returned from one of the most delightful trips I have taken in a long while. I would love to tell about all the funny moments--closed violin stores, fat-induced gastro-colic reflex, cookie demands--but since I so much to record, I'll just keep it to a boring travel log.

On Sunday evening, Ethan and I headed to Cleveland in my new sweet Volvo, a car that I now know was made with me in mind :-) There, Ethan met up with a very special "someone". For all of your enquiring minds, I must leave it up to Ethan if he wants to go public with it all. Sorry!

Monday morning, we woke up and spent more time with the special someone. In fact, she came along with Ethan and me to run a few errands. The best part of the morning (besides being with "her") was breakfast. One of my favorite restaurants in the world is "First Watch", a breakfast and lunch diner. Ahhh...crepes with strawberries, blueberries and bananas, doused in yogurt with a giant blueberry muffin on the side. Potatoes, too. Then, we were off to a REAL mall, not the cheesy building we have here in rural Pennsylvania. I replaced my patio umbrella at Pottery Barn (whew!) and found animal bracelets that the girls have been wanting.

Around 11 a.m., Ethan and I left for Lansing, driving straight through and watched the gas prices fall the further west we headed. By 3 p.m., we were in Lansing at the State Library and Archives. The main purpose of this trip was to search out more information about John's maternal family. All of his great-grandparents came from Europe (information that I had found previously), but I needed lots more details. Ethan pulled up his bootstraps and jumped right into microfilm rolls and Detroit city directories and computer indices with no hesitation. Within an hour, we had jumped back another generation when we found the marriage record of Ethan's great-great-grandparents with their parents listed. This was so incredibly exciting! Turns out, they are from Danzig, Germany which is now Gdansk, Poland, the one and only city that John and I visited just last December and that is in Ethan's mission. I started crying when we saw it on the microfilm reader and Ethan couldn't wait to start entering everything in the computer (including every detail from this most valuable source). We found other little things in the remaining two hours, but I told Ethan that if we found nothing else in the following days, I could go home happy.

That night, after dinner and a stop at Quality Dairy, I needed to work out (to maintain my exercise program for my diet study). I invited Ethan, not thinking he'd come, but 10 minutes later, there he was. It was such fun to watch an hour of TV while we switched off on the elliptical and the treadmill in the hotel fitness center. If only that could happen everyday, I would be much more motivated to keep exercising.

The next morning, we were back to the library as soon as it opened. Within an hour, we had found more information. We found the one great grandparent's name on the ship's manifest, again, coming from Danzig. How could we be sure it was him? For 30 years, he listed himself as a carpenter on census records. Unbelievably, he was one of the only people to list his profession: joiner. Again, goosebumps. We also spent countless hours, going through Detroit city directories, trying to follow the lives of two families that are eluding us. Ethan almost couldn't open the 100+ year-old directories, seeing them falling apart in our hands, because of his love of books. :-) After about four hours of doing that, Ethan turned to me and said he was just exhausted. Amen to genealogy exhaustion--you work for hours, it feels like minutes and you wonder where the time has gone.

We had to leave the library early because we had an appointment at the Detroit temple that evening. Despite a huge, undiscovered mess-up with my Subway sandwich and traffic like you can't imagine, we finally made it. Having only my family names, Ethan chose to perform the endowment for his seventh great-grandfather, Leonard Countryman. Looking through the names, I appropriately picked his wife, Maria Magdalena Uhrig. Funny thing was though, I couldn't stop thinking about Ethan's other side of his family.

That night, back to the treadmill and elliptical for the season finale of The Good Wife, my favorite show this year. We finished at 11 p.m., went back to the hotel room, checked email, read scriptures, said prayers and went to bed.

The next morning, we were up early, packed up our things and headed to Grand Rapids, Michigan. My 102-year-old grandmother, Margaret Apgar, lives there. It was so good to see her, and Ethan was very sweet and kind with her. She's just amazing. Her mind is clear, her body is fit and she just keep going. She jokes that people insist she doesn't look any older than 80--an offense to most, but a compliment to her! I heard several of the stories that I have heard before, but then she shared one with Ethan that really made me think. She was very interested in his knowledge of German. Turns out, she studied German for 5 years in college, but never learned how to speak it. When I asked her how that was possible, she told us that German had just begun being taught in college again after WWII. During the war, no one was allowed to teach it, read it, or speak it. She even said that there were plums that were called German plums, but during the war, the name was changed to Liberty plums (sound familiar?) When the language was allowed in the schools again, the men who taught it were German, but were terrible teachers. I can hardly imagine a language not being taught in school now for that reason. After an hour, she was just exhausted, so we left her, but promised to return this summer.

Back to Lansing and the library for one last mad dash to retrieve any other information. Unlike the other two days, I stood back and told Ethan that he was going to direct me in what to do. I had already seen that he "gets" it in regards to genealogy. He understands what is there and what he needs to find. He loves math, and in many ways, genealogy uses the same logic to find an answer. He didn't hesitate, but pulled microfilm rolls out and told me what to look for. At 2 p.m., exactly when we needed to leave, we found the name he was looking for. I was exhausted and ready to go, but I could tell he wanted to take that a step further, so he pulled out more rolls. I felt like I needed to pull out a piece of paper and record the date and "Day that somebody in my family (besides me) learned that genealogy is so much bigger than all of us." It was a beautiful thing to see and something that he won't forget. We can't wait to take this information and head to Utah with it in a couple of weeks.

We knew we needed to leave an hour later, because I still needed to drive home to State College that evening. We stopped at Outback for dinner, and Ethan listened to me ramble on and on about my family, and Gram, and my childhood memories of Gram and my dad. I shed several tears, and Ethan just listened. It was amazing to see the experience come full circle. I dropped him off in Cleveland for a Young Single Adult conference, and I drove home.

After seeing Gram, Ethan was pretty quiet in the car. When I asked him what he was thinking, he said that really this trip had been about his past, his present and his future. At times, he felt a bit disgusted with some of the family members that he had found, thinking that they were liars, or inaccurate in their dates. However, he couldn't help feeling overwhelmed with love for them. Then, seeing Gram, his great-grandmother, who is still alive and yet has memories from the past century represented the present for him. The future? Well, again, I'll leave that for him to tell in his own time.

In the meantime, I have a new memory of a precious time with my oldest son.