The Repository

I had what I guess was a rude awakening today.

My mother had a dental appointment scheduled at 2 and my cousin Niecie was going to come up from the Bay Area and give her a mani/pedi in the morning.  

Among the things I found during the big Office Reorganization was a box of old, old black and white snapshots of my mother's family that had been torn out of someone's photo album (the black page still sticking to the back).  Many of these photos are duplicates of ones I already have and in any case, I have a ton of photos here to go through "some day" and definitely don't need to add these to the four big boxes I already have.  As Niecie has become, with Peach's death, the family historian, I thought she would like to have the photos.

Every time I post one of the old photos in the private family group on Facebook, Niecie is the one who gets all excited and happy to see the old photos, so I told her about this big box of photos and she said she definitely wanted them.

So when I knew she would be at Atria, I took the box and went there early, an hour before the dental appointment.  Niecie was delighted and suggested that we go out to the lobby and look at them there, since there was a table and better light.

My mother was pretty much OK, though when I was going to get coffee for the 3 of us and asked if she wanted cream in her coffee, she threw her hands in the air and said "you guys figure it out.  I don't even know what you're talking about."

So we settled in at the table and Niecie started looking at the photos, asking with almost every photo "now who is this?"  Sometimes my mother knew, almost always I did because I've been seeing them all of my life.  As I answered her questions and corrected her guesses it occurred to me that with Peach and Kathy gone, I am the only one in the family who knows all this stuff!!!!

I do have a couple of cousins older than I am, but they have always lived at a distance and I don't have a clue how much they know about our grandparents when they lived in Inverness and the people who visited them, or what Peach and I looked like as little kids, or how to tell the babies one from another based on the date of the photo.  

I can.  And I think I am the only one in the family who can. (I call Niecie my cousin, but in reality she's is the daughter of my cousin Shirley, who would have been able to identify all of these photos, had she not died of cancer several years ago).

That's a pretty heady responsibility.  When I die, the IDs of all these photos dies with me.  I don't know that anybody cares, but if this family is typical of many other families, the people who really are interested and care, won't realize they care until everybody who can answer their questions is gone.

That's certainly what happened with my father's side of the family.  I inherited the scrapbooks of my godfather, my grandfather and my father and I don't have a clue who is in the photos and what is happening.  This is particularly sad in the case of my grandparents' vaudeville scrapbook, filled with many of the stars of the company they were members of, but I don't have a clue who they are or, in the case of informal photos of this group, what was the occasion for the photos.  That is all lost to history now.

But it seems I am now the only one who can keep the memories of my mother's family alive, through the remaining photos.  She can remember some of them, but not all of them.  I can figure out most of them.

It just feels weird to realize that.

As for the dental appointment, it went very well.

To my surprise there was no resistance.  Maybe her defenses were down after a morning with Niecie and then our session with the photographs.  I just said "it's time to go" and she followed me.

It was kind of endearing, though, that even though she didn't know what was happening, she still had the dental nervousness.  "I'm very nervous and I don't know why," she told me.  When I asked her about it, she said "I don't know where I'm going and what's going to happen to me."

As for the appointment itself, it was a perfect example of why I love Cindy so much.  I remember when I first went to her after >20 years of not seeing a dentist and fearing that my teeth were about to fall out.  She had been a friend for years, but not my dentist.  She scheduled me for the last appointment of the day so there would be nobody in the office except me.  Years later she told me that she should have taken a picture of my teeth because she had never seen such a thick piece of plaque behind my front teeth and was sure a photo could be published in a dental magazine, but she didn't want to make me feel uncomfortable.  She truly changed my life and I now brush, floss, and see my dentist 3 times a year.  She also took care of me herself until she felt I would be comfortable seeing a hygienist.

So she took my mother to the back of the office, where dental procedures are done, and she was very gentle with her, examining all of her teeth, then asking if she would mind if they cleaned them.  My mother agreed and Debbie, the hygienist cleaned.  Then Cindy came back in and asked if my mother would feel comfortable having her teeth x-rayed, which she agreed to.  A full mouth x-ray was done.  Debbie told me she would be taking 18 x-rays, which would not have to be repeated for 5 years, which I told her meant it probably would not have to be done again.

While the x-rays were being done, Cindy talked with me and said she'd like to study the x-rays and then meet with me about the condition of my mother's mouth.  She asked if I thought my mother should be at that meeting and I said no, so we have that ahead of us.

I listened while Cindy tested the gum pockets and most were 3 or 4, but a couple were 7 and I think I heard her say one was 10.  She's also lost 2 teeth, Cindy says.  So I'm sure she would like to do some work, but the question is, I think, how much dental work you do on someone who is 97.  I'll find out when we have our meeting.

So she's had her annual exam, she's had a CT scan and she's had a dental appointment and, depending on what my meeting with Cindy reveals, she may be free of medical interference for awhile.

Nuts on the Family Tree

I had a fun phone call this afternoon.  It was Brianna who, at age 7, is researching her family tree.  I was able to give her the names of her great grandparents and her great-great grandparents (though I mistakenly told her my grandmother's name was Grace, when it was actually Lucy Grace, but don't tell her, OK?) and that my ancestors had come from Ireland and Scotland (I keep forgetting my father's mother's family came from Germany because we had absolutely no contact with that part of the family and I grew up knowing of my Irish and Scottish heritage and not realizing there was a German side too.

Peach spent years researching our side of the family, tracing the Kilpatricks back to Scotland and the guy who was a sidekick of Robert the Bruce.  

It's where we learned of the family crest, which shows a hand holding a bloody dagger.  The Kilpatrick web page (because there are people who are VerySerious about such things) describe how this came to be our crest:

In 1232 A.D. the Kilpatrick/Kirkpatrick coat-of-arms was authorised by King Alexander II of Scotland. The crest of the coat-of-arms, a hand holding a dagger dripping with blood, represents the instrument used by Sir Roger Kilpatrick when he went to the Church of Grey Friars and killed the tyrant John "The Red" Comyn, thus ending his rule and saved Scotland for King Robert the Bruce.  The motto on the  coat-of- arms, "I Make Sure" or "I Make Sicar" also refers to the same circumstance, meaning that he had made sure that Scotland's arch enemy was dead.

So don't mess with me or my family, you guys...I come from a long line of violent ancestors!

(I had to laugh when doing some research on John "The Red" Comyn.  Wikipedia lists his occupation as: claimed the throne of Scotland through his father and mother, Lord of Badenoch.  Beats "accounting," I guess!)

Since both sides of my mother's family come from Scotland, I get confused about who first arrived in North America and when.  I think it was the Scott side where two brothers immigrated to Canada.  Their name in Scotland had been Mathison and somehow because of their country of origin, it got changed to "Scott" here and the place where they were living in Canada became known as Scott's Corners.  (It is now a different name)

From beginnings of cohorts of the King, and having a town named after you, somehow my ancestors, both the Kirkpatricks and the Scotts, ultimately settled in Iowa and the Carolinas and became farmers.

I am fascinated by the genealogy shows on TV, watching big name personalities trace their roots.  Of course they hire genealogists to do the research for them, but it's amazing the things they uncover.  Peach did amazing work recording our lineage and had a whole closet full of binders on the story of our family, all of which she had to leave behind when they moved to Iowa. She made a lot of friends during her explorations, though, including uncovering a cousin in Argentina we did not know we had.  Her father is my mother's cousin and is the only person in the family who is older than she is (he turns hunnert this month).  My mother ignores any talk of him because she wants to be the oldest one!  I hear from his daughter periodically, and that's always fun.

The problem with ancestry is that we don't really appreciate it often until it's too late and all the people who could have told you all the stories are gone.  I am sorry I never asked my grandparents about their history in vaudeville, and though I know my grandmother was a child during the San Francisco 1906 earthquake and fire, she was so terrified at the memories that I never knew more than that she lived in a tent city for awhile and I don't have a clue what it was like for my grandfather, who was also a child at that time, or what their memories of the quake itself were.

One of the second cousins took all of Peach's binders to store, but has no interest in researching the family history herself.  Maybe someday someone in my children's generation will want to know where they came from and it will be there waiting for them.

I was going to research my father's side of the family once and signed on to Ancestry.com, but it's a long, time-consuming project (and a bit spendy to boot) and what I did not need then (or now) is another time consuming project.  I did, however, find someone who was also researching that side of the family.  She was my age and her father had been my father's cousin, whom I don't believe I ever met.  I was able to share photos with her of my grandfather's family and got from her a few names of people on the family tree I didn't know before.

Brianna's interest in her family tree will probably end with this project, but should she ever want to investigate further, boy can I give her some place to start!