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Mom's
Picked this magnet up in Provincetown, MA on a trip back east to see fall color a year ago Household Hints from A Medieval
Home Companion: If your wine is too tart Take a basketful of very ripe black grapes and throw them whole into the cask through the bunghole and it will improve. tomorrow: I am a theatre critic OK...so it's a new "career", but if you're interested in reading my reviews, go here Updated 2/11/01 WHAT I'M READING... Christmas gift from my friend, Diane, who felt it was time I learn more about Australia also He, She and It Steve tells me I have to read this book. WHAT I WATCHED... SURVIVOR! That's it for today!
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FAMILY TIES 23 February 2001 Bagpipes are in my blood. Seriously. I love bagpipes. I remember standing out in front of our house years ago and hearing the sound of a bagpipe somewhere off in the distance...which is a bit unusual because we live in a normal suburb. Turns out some guy used to practice his pipes standing on the lawn in front of his house (presumably his wife wouldn’t let him rehearse inside). We haven’t heard the pipes calling for years now. I often wonder if he moved or if the neighbors just complained loud enough. One of my fondest memories of living here is going to the university rec hall to see The Black Watch on a tour through California. (Never knew so many men in this town have kilts!) Something about a hall filled with bagpipes all playing at top volume. It stirs my Scottish genes. Walt and I were in Scotland a few years back, standing in front of Edinburgh Castle imagining what the plaza would be when it was filled with pipers at the annual tattoo. Somewhere off in the distance, a piper was playing for a busload of tourists arriving at the park below the castle. I do love bagpipes. I’ve been thinking about my Scottish genes today because I spent most of the day moving my cousin’s web page, which she designed 3-4 years ago, from one site to another on Geocities. It’s not a complicated web page, but we were writing e-mail back and forth to get the elements just the way she wanted them. And of course there’s always endless tweaking. My cousin is the family genealogist. A few years ago my aunt turned over a collection of letters that had been sent from the grandparents several generations removed to their children, who had moved from Iowa to California. The letters give a good picture of life on a farm in the midwest in the mid 1800s. Some of the letters are from kids writing home from the battlefields of the Civil war. A fascinating collection. The collection sparked her interest in research the family history and it has led her through a bazillion web sites, the LDS genealogy library, the National Archives, and a cemetery in Arkansas to uncover a host of relatives none of us had a clue we had. In the process she’s managed to make friends of (very) distant relatives all over the country. (She even discovered that if you go back far enough, my friend Bill, who died last year, and I were distant cousins!) Thanks to her research, we’ve all discovered that we’re descended from some Scottish warriors and the family motto, "I make sure," came about because our ancestor, a sidekick of Robert the Bruce, went back to stab an enemy a second time just to "make sure" that he was really dead. That’s the kind of stock I come from--don’t mess with me! We also had an ancestor who rode with Butch and Sundance, though never a big name in the Hole in the Wall gang. Not a bunch of high achievers, those Kirkpatricks. The terrific thing about all this work she’s done over the years is that it has brought the family together. My mother’s parents had 11 children, 10 of whom grew to adulthood. Through many, many marriages (our motto is "marry early, marry often"), those 10 kids gave my grandparents 32 grandchildren and lord only knows how many great grands and great-great grands there are by now. Because of all the renewed interest in ancestry and family and genealogy, the family started having yearly gatherings. We meet in the little town of Olema (the "town" is about half a block long) at a trailer park which backs up onto the land where our great-grandfather taught school and raised his family. The first year a handful of people showed up. This year, the fourth or fifth year of the reunion, we had something like 100 people. The nice thing is that we are all starting to know each other. We come from all over the country to get together. There are cousins and second cousins whose names I never knew. Each year we’ve had a bagpiper start the festivities; last year we added Scottish games to the celebration (well...faux Scottish games--but the kids had a great time tossing PVC pipe and pretending they were cabers). This year there will be a pageant re-enacting the scene in Scotland centuries ago. The best thing is that it has revitalized the family, renewed our sense of connectedness, and reminded us all that we are part of that guy holding aloft a dagger and pledging "I make sure." That’s a good thing. I think. |
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Some pictures from this journal |
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Created 2/21/01 by Bev Sykes |
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