Anything labelled as "the beginning" is done so arbitrarily. Can any beginning be definitively assigned? Especially when that beginning relates to the history of a family. Here we have a family: four people, a father, a mother, two children--son and daughter. Where does the family begin? With the parents? grandparents? great-grandparents? great-great-grandparents? And what about the ancillary branches: the sisters and brothers of the father and the mother, the offspring of those sisters and brothers, the in-laws? And so the tree branches.
A little over twenty years ago, someone died in my husband's family, and then someone else, and then someone else, and before we knew it, we had inherited boxes and boxes of family letters, cards, magazine and newspaper clippings, pamphlets, family Bibles, photographs, photograph albums. My husband and his sister divided the furniture and objects that had immediate value and use; we ended up with boxes, files, diaries, and photographs going back to the early 1800s. For years we hauled around this stuff, weighed down by history and someone else's lack of organization. When a great-aunt who had taught first-grade in Houston, Texas, for thirty years died, she left behind hundreds of greeting cards her students had given her over the years, even valentines with candy still inside. Each of us has more than enough detritus from our own lives; imagine inheriting the detritus of the lives of people who kept everything.
A couple of years ago, I began some attempt at organizating all this stuff by creating seven photograph albums, one for each of my and my husband's children and my husband's sister's children. I included photographs from one line of the family, going back to the late 1800s, a few newspaper clippings, a sampling of greeting cards, and other bits of interest. Yet boxes remain. Who has the time to go through every box, pick through every letter (each with its own eccentric handwriting), sort through every newspaper clipping or magazine cutting and put it all in order? So here, I'll attempt an order of a different kind. I'll pull something from the boxes and post it here. The order will be in the index. Everything else will be haphazard, a surprise, a treasure hunt.
And so we begin with a family Bible, one owned by a Mrs. L. T. (could be "J") Armstrong, living in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1878. This is my husband's great-great grandmother. Somewhere in the boxes are obituaries of various members of this family from the 1800s. At some point, those obituaries will appear on this blog--as I come across them again. Here, however, we have the family Bible of a mother who worried about two sons who decided to go to Texas: Baker (my husband's great-grandfather) and Robert. On the inside pages of the family Bible, the mother records these departures. Later she was to write the sons. We have some of the letters sent to Baker. Those, also, shall appear on this blog as I re-discover them.
"Baker left for Texas, Oct. 8th 1884," the mother writes. And so the son leaves Virginia behind and begins a new life in Texas.
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