Before They Were Mom and Dad

I’ve been watching The Waltons.

That may be partly responsible for sending me down this particular rabbit hole. Watching that family live through the Depression made me think about my own parents—not as Mom and Dad, but as children growing up in a world I can hardly imagine.  I remember stories about only being allowed to wear shoes to school or church.

My Dad was born in 1921 in Carbon Hill, Ohio, a tiny coal-mining community in Hocking County. His family had come a long way to get there … from Germany before immigrating to America and eventually settling in Ohio.

But genealogy gives you names and dates. It doesn't tell you what it felt like to be a little boy.  The following year's census gives us one of those cold little facts that suddenly feels anything but cold: Dad and his father were listed as boarders.

What was that like for an eight-year-old boy who had just lost his mother?  She died in childbirth and baby William was adopted into another family and disappeared from their everyday lives (although, wonderfully, he reconnected with the family many years later).

My mother's childhood wasn't exactly Leave It to Beaver, either.  She was one of eleven children (born in 1927) growing up in Columbus, Ohio. Her father was an alcoholic. On payday and  there was money to be had, Grandma sometimes sent one of the younger children down to the bar to get some of it from him before he drank it all. (He eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver).
And Mom carried another reminder of childhood right on her face. When she was about two years old, she put the hot end of an electrical iron cord in her mouth. It left her with a terrible scar near her mouth. I imagine that scar bothered her far more than it ever bothered my father.

Because after the war, Dad met her at a tiny diner enjoying a malted with her sister.  And he thought she was beautiful.

Of all the dates and names and census records in a 108-page family genealogy someone prepared for me years ago, that may be the piece of family history that matters most to me.

Two people came out of childhoods that were hard in ways their own children would never fully understand. One lost his mother when he was eight. One grew up in a house with ten siblings and an alcoholic father. Neither came from anything resembling the comfortable, protected childhoods we hope to give children today.

Yet somehow they got from there to me.

I can trace one branch of my family back to Germany and another to England. There are immigrants, farmers, soldiers, coal-country families and even a Revolutionary War captain tucked into those 108 pages.
That's interesting.

But I'm beginning to think family history isn't really about seeing how far backward we can go.  It's about going back just far enough to understand the people we actually knew.

I knew Mom and Dad.

I'm only now beginning to understand the children they once were.

Dad and Me and Mom 1953