Relative Something

I don’t know why I never previously felt much connection with the lives of my ancestors beyond the obvious fact of not giving them the attention they deserved for most of my life. Even after beginning to collect names and snippets of detail when I first began delving into the family tree in a quest for the original ethnicity of our surname, any incredible facts learned ended up being quickly filed along with the dates, names, and places for future reference.

In my latest quest for specific details of the families in Pierce County, WI, I discovered WikiTree, where citing source information is a requirement. Yesterday, I dipped my toes in their forum section for a weekly “weekend-chat” thread of fellow genealogists checking in on their week, writing about life in general as well as how genealogy research is progressing, and I introduced myself for the first time.

With one simple comment to me about what stories my ancestors hold, it struck me about how many there are to tell. Too many to do them justice in a single response.

From my parents’ adventures as newlyweds roughing it in Glacier Park; my grandfather, Forrest J. Hays’s accomplishments as a Cargill Vice-President and “Dean of Transportation” as CEO of Cargo Carriers; my paternal great-grandfather, John W. Hays traveling the country as Secretary-Treasurer of the International Typographical Union; my maternal grandfather, Walter Elliott perishing in a fire after getting my aunt and grandmother out of the house at a time when my mother was serving in the WAVES in Miami, FL; my paternal great-grandfather, Charles B. Elliott achieving the first Ph.D. granted by the University of Minnesota and going on to become a judge who was chosen by President Taft to be an ambassador to the Philippines; there are some captivating tales worth honoring.

While revisiting my boxes of family history information acquired over the years, I decided to digitize the unbelievable pages of a hand-painted, gold-inlaid, bound retirement proclamation presented to my great-grandfather, John Waters Hays by the Typographical Union.

Check this out: John Waters Hays Retirement Proclamation

The low point and a high point of my day came next. While looking for a portrait of Minnie Church that I believed to be in my collections of old photos, I opened a very large and very tattered fancy photo album that was filled with amazing portraits of family members, but not a single clue as to who each person was.

Making the situation more frustrating, the marriage certificate for John W. Hays and Minnie Church was folded up and stored between the pages, further adding to the probability these were faces that go with some of the Pierce County families I would most like to identify.

Luckily, the opposite was true when I opened the next album from a similar time period. It was filled with generations of the families above my paternal grandmother, Helen Barrett, and there was a name penciled in on the bottom of each and every portrait.

It’s a researcher’s dream.

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