Lessons from My Great-Grandaunt Ethel
Notes on a hidden life
Some 15 years ago, I subscribed to one of those family-tree Web sites. You know the ones: they all provide easy-to-follow links to historical records of people’s lives, starting with parish registers, newspapers, and censuses, and working all the way to possibly DNA-connected links to far-flung ancestors and contemporaries. I went back to it from time to time, but never for long and never at great depth — it can be a real commitment time suck (as they say), and there always seemed to be so many other things requiring attention, especially while I was working.
But age — especially retirement — can change a lot about the ways you regard the world, and the passage of time. And so I’ve plunged back into the maelstrom of family history.
My sisters, brother, and I are blessed by the presence in our lives of our (currently) 93-year-old mother and her 81-year-old brother. Both have infirmities familiar to the aged (including, now, us “kids” ourselves) — the occasionally missed joke, the ten thousand betrayals of muscles. But both are still sharp and, well, memorious1. Sometimes the memories have to be nudged along, but they’re in there, all right, just waiting to be dislodged. And that — the dislodging of memories — has become a favorite element, for both Mom and me, of our weekly video calls.
Which is how I met my great-grandaunt Ethel.
A couple weeks ago, towards the end of our call, I was picking Mom’s brain about something-or-other in her mother’s — my grandmom’s — life. She replied sadly that she just didn’t know; “It’s a shame,” she added, “we can’t ask Aunt Ethel. I bet she knew the story…”
We’d already been talking for awhile and were both tired by then, so I was listening with only half my attention. We said good-bye, and I forgot all about Aunt Ethel… until the next time I talked to Mom. I asked her, again at a point when the conversation was already winding down, “By the way, who the heck was Aunt Ethel?”
Here’s what she told me:
Aunt Ethel — actually her great-aunt — was one of Mom’s favorite adults when she herself was a girl in the 1930s. There always seemed to be something interesting going on in the small South-Jersey town where Ethel lived with her family: her husband Ralston and their ten (!) children, and eventually their children.
Mom didn’t know much about what Ralston did for a living, but she knew a few things about Ethel, you bet.
Ethel, it seems, used to “follow the horses.” She followed them so religiously that she actually had regular overnight access to a room or apartment in a nearby town much closer to the racetrack, to make “following” them that much easier.
I asked, “Did Ralston go with her?"
“No, he always stayed behind. Ethel would just take a car and drive over there.”
On one occasion, Ethel invited Mom — who did not live in the same town as all the Pharos, and did not live in the town with the racetrack — to spend a night with her at her horse-following digs. It was exciting, Mom said: before Ethel drove her back home to her parents’ place, she made up Mom’s face with cosmetics, and put a flower in her hair, and off they went. (My conservative grandmother was satisfyingly scandalized.)
So then what happened to Aunt Ethel etc., I wondered. Why hadn’t I ever met her, or any of them?
“Oh, she eventually followed the horses down to Florida. She had favorite ones, you know, and they went down there to stay warm, so she went down to Florida, too.” But Pharo, and the rest? “Oh, I think he eventually realized she wasn’t coming back, so he and the kids moved down there, too.”
One of the boys, Joe, apparently died during World War II. But, Mom said, she never saw any of them after they moved.
Aunt Ethel just, well, walked out of the landscape of Mom’s life.
This made me mildly crazy. I’d been dying to find people with colorful lives on my family tree! All those (per the decennial census) painters and paperhangers, and seamstresses, and steelworkers, and secretaries, and baymen, and housewives, and miscellaneous “day laborers” — but right there, in Aunt Ethel, I seemed to have found a bit of exotica. “If she hadn’t had kids, I bet she’d have been a flapper in the ’20s!” I said, and Mom agreed. She’d left her family to follow the horses! How… how… fun!
But that was it? Did I really have to say good-bye to Aunt Ethel after all that build-up? Off I went to my family-tree app, to learn what I could of what would no doubt be a hugely entertaining story.
If you’re familiar with such apps and sites, you know the most frustrating thing about them: they reveal almost nothing about what was happening in people’s heads and hearts — what they worried about, what made them happy, their favorite books or music, who’d broken their hearts and why, why they’d come to live at new Address X instead of Y. You don’t know the important stuff, unless they’re famous; you don’t know them. You can trace their footsteps, so to speak, and if you’re lucky you might find a reference to them in a “social notes from all over”-type newspaper story.
But really, what you’ve got is not a fully fleshed-out tree. It’s more like a skeleton, no more than hinting at a given person’s reality — the meat which once hung on it. And there it stops.
Even so, those hints can shade what you do know, in ways that reveal truths — maybe — of somebody' else’s life, but truths — especially — of your own…
And so we return to Aunt Ethel’s story, what I can read of it from the bones suspended in the tree so far.
Consider, first, Ethel’s son Joe. Born in 1920, he’d have been at least 11 when my mother first met him; he’d live with Ethel, Ralston, and most of the rest of their small-town family through the 1940 census. (All three girls had since married and moved nearby; brother Franklyn was with sister Ethelyn and her husband. All the other “kids” remaining in the original household were boys.) At age 20, a little after the census recorded Joe’s presence, off he went to fight in the coming World War. Says his enlistment record: height, 62 inches; weight, 138 pounds. I’ve seen no photos of him, but he wasn’t a big guy. Little Joe.
There’s no record, of course, of what thoughts and words might have passed between Ethel and Ralston when he enlisted. We weren’t at war then, and wouldn’t be for another year; maybe there was just a disquiet in the household.
Nor do we know their reactions when, in 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed, or when Joe’s US Army Corps of Engineers, D Company, 803rd Engineer Battalion (Aviation) was posted to duty in the Phillippines. The record is silent on how things went back there in South Jersey when news of the US surrender in May 1942 reached Ethel and Ralston’s ears; silent, still, on their response when they got word that Joe had died in Japanese POW camp #14 just a week or so later, on May 14. We may assume that the blow fell heavily on the household.
So what, then, must have been going through their minds five months later, in October, when Joe’s younger brother Walter enlisted? What was going through Walter’s own mind then, for that matter?
And what about not quite a year later, in July 1943, when news arrived of Walter’s own death in a bomber crew training crash in Colorado? Still no record.
But we do know that by the time of the next census, in 1950, Ethel and Ralston and their remaining unmarried boys were all living in Miami, Florida. Ralston eventually died there; Ethel returned to New Jersey, very late in life, before she herself died in 1976.
“Following the horses”? Is that really what uprooted them, sent them packing from the people they’d grown up with, and the area they’d lived for decades? Did Ethel continue to be the “fun” gadabout after 1943, swanning off to the racetrack as her devil-may-care moods took her?
I can’t help projecting ahead, to someone — say, a distant cousin, X times removed — trying to reconstruct my life from what’s available in official records.
What I’ve always regarded as the delights and cataclysms of my life, all the day-to-day obsessions and minor annoyances, the things I’ve prided myself on and the things I hope (without really believing) no one remembers: pffffft! What circumstances surrounded my first date, or my second, my first sexual encounter? Will the future family-tree-builders know how completely pissed off I was when, in my 70s, I had to be fitted for a so-called “dental appliance,” or how relieved I was when we’d finally jumped through the last damned bureaucratic hoop just to get our car registered here? Will they know the things I cried the hardest about in my life or how much fun it was to laugh again, finally? Will they know that my wife and I once had a little dog named Sophie and then, to our horror, suddenly did not? What did it mean to me when I told people, for a few years, that I was a teacher, or that I delivered furniture or drove a cab, or developed software for a living, or thought of myself as (gods help me) a writer? What was the first complete sentence I spoke, and which will be the last I will have written?2
Gone.
Carried away on the wind.
Something sobering in that, huh?
Blatant callback to a Jorge Luis Borges story, “Funes the Memorious.” (You can read and/or download a PDF of it here, for now.)
Ironic, wouldn’t it be, if that one is the last?
recently heard about Storyworth and it reminded me of what you wrote here ... https://www.facebook.com/MicahAndSarahhh/videos/976966280413991
Sobering indeed. Glad to hear you know parts of your Aunt Ethel’s story.