I've been doing family history a long time. I can remember Mom spreading out her genealogy sheets on the dining room table. Back then it was all on paper. She gave me some blank forms and charts to begin my own records. I would copy her charts in my best handwriting. I found some of those old charts in her files.
As I copied the charts and life stories, I learned about my grandparents, their parents, and their grandparents. Through my teenage years, I searched for stories. When we would go to libraries, I would look in the indexes of history books to see if any of my ancestors were mentioned. I had some modest success at it. When I was in college, I took a class on basic research. I can remember the thrill of finding that first census record with one of my families. I was so excited! I discovered that as I found records and documents for my ancestors, I could piece their life stories together. As I did so, I somehow felt a connection to them and a feeling that I knew them.
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| Ellen Bennett Darnley Rogers |
That brings me to the parallels. Sometimes I would find things that happened to an ancestor that I could really relate to, because I was going through something similar. I felt they would understand. Some years ago, I did a lot of research on my second great-grandmother, Ellen Bennett Darnley Rogers. I always admired her strong faith and testimony that led her, as a young woman, to travel to America with her husband and two children. In New York, her husband and little girl got sick and died. Ellen was faced with the choice of returning to her family in England, who very much wanted her back, or to go on to Salt Lake City, alone with her little toddler son. Ellen chose to go on. She walked the whole way, often carrying her little boy because he would not stay in the wagon. I honored and loved her because of her strong committment to her faith.
Recently, I have found another connection with Ellen. I have been gradually losing hearing in my right ear. Through family stories I knew Ellen was deaf -- they said that she lost her hearing from sleeping on cold ground while crossing the plains. But on the 1860 census, before she had made the long trek, it said she was deaf. Ellen was a weaver. She grew up in Yorkshire where the cloth factories were built. She most likely was hired as a girl of 10 or 12 to work in the factory prior to working on the noisy steam loom. Most likely that is how she lost her hearing.
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| Vivian Perkins Hickman |
Another parallel--I was named after my paternal grandmother, Vivian (Perkins) Hickman. In 1958 she had a rare brain tumor. At that time they were just beginning to pioneer microscopic surgery and her tumor was successfully removed. There were newspaper stories about her being a "walking miracle." Recently I was diagnosed with an
acoustic neuroma, a rare tumor that grows on the auditory nerve. I will have to have brain surgery this summer to remove it. I will be thinking a lot of my both grandmothers, their courage and their faith. I like to think that they will be with me.
