S1:E6 - Making Family Connections

First, let me just give a huge shout out to my amazing husband - none of this would be possible without his support.

This week's podcast is about finding my voice through #genealogy and researching the line of Mothers back to my maternal 3rd great grandmother. We are all that our ancestors were, and learning their stories is important to who we are now.

#history #kentucky #nurse #ancestors

Instagram: @momsstrangemagic Website: momsstrangemagic.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Mom Strange Magic. I'm Kim, the face and voice behind Mom Strange Magic, where I make things and help people. And today, first, happy St. Patrick's Day. It's a little snowy here, very cold after a weekend of warm weather. And um, I'm doing the podcast a little bit early this week because on the 18th, I will be celebrating my 28th wedding anniversary to a person in my life who has not only provided for myself and our family, but is my hero. He has consistently shown up and worked hard to make sure that everyone in my family is thriving and well. And so I'm gonna the first part of the podcast, I'm gonna I want to talk a little bit about that and just a little bit. And so, like the first third and the the last two thirds, I'm going to share a wild and wonderful story with all y'all. Um, but first, let me just take a moment to really give appreciation to my husband, to my partner, my best friend, um, sometimes my closest co-conspirator, but a person that has consistently shown up for me in ways that no one else has in my life. Sometimes people provide little things here and there, but this man has survived so much. Um, you know, he just so much. Just he's lived through a severe case of MRSA, he had horrible shingles, you know, life changes, getting older, things of that nature. And it is a time in his life where he can retire. And due to the circumstances of the care that is needed for some of the family, he is still going to work brightly and with love, showing up on days when most of us would just throw in the towel. And he does this because not out of duty or obligation, but with love. And his patience with me as I have healed from things and I've grown from things and I have learned things is amazing. Because if you know me, sometimes I can be a little difficult. And then, of course, I could hear somebody, you know, out there going, sometimes, come on, Kim. Um, I live my life full throttle, but also I live very slowly. So, and you know, I came to him with a whole mixed bag of things, and he has patiently held my hand as I go through every one of these little drops of who I am and healed them. He's been with me as I gathered all these certificates, he's been with me as I've experienced great joys and I've experienced great losses. And um, I'm not a huge person to be like soulmates because I think that's a little bit whatever. Um, but if I were to use something kind of in the pool of soulmates, is that I just consider myself very lucky, and I'm grateful to share my time and my life with someone who has often put his own wishes and dreams to the side so that we his, you know, the so that I, his wife, and his kids could have something more, something more than he had, and to give them love and compassion and time. It's just amazing. So none of this would be possible without him, not any of it. Um, that's not me saying, oh, I didn't do anything or I'm not worthy or whatever. All I'm saying is that having the support like someone uh like having his support in my life has brought me from what is wrong with me to wait a minute, nothing's wrong with me. I've just been trying to be and do something that was never mine to do because and listen to this good segue, because I was at odds with what is within me, what is my genetic story, what is my epigenetic story, what is my career story, what is everything? Here comes a cat. Um, it's Tootsie. If you watched it, if you're here from the video, you know that it was whiskey that was here first, but Tootsie, Tootsie is the podcast cat. I think she likes the microphone. Um I didn't have a lot of information about either side of my biological family. Now, I did have access to family for my half-sister's dad because they were there. I did not at the time know my biological father. I learned about him when I was 21. You know, you see a lot of this uh as a genealogist, you see a lot of this in genetics where all of a sudden people are like, wait a minute, how did I get to be like that? And it's like, well, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, is um you have relatives that you didn't know you had. And this really began when places like um Ancestry and even National Geographic did it, um, when you started started getting commercial um out-of-pocket testing to you know, because people wanted to find what their lineage was, what what their family history was. So people started finding family that they didn't know they had. And while it can be shocking, it is, for some people, it answered questions that they had and and it facilitated healing within families. I became very interested in that. At the time, I had only really done a little bit of paper genealogy, and while that's really great, when you really start diving into genealogy, you begin to see that sometimes things like census takers or records or family history is not exactly as it should be. You see this a lot on the PBS show, Finding Your Roots, and um this is where I would like to take a moment to say this genealogy is not one for the faint of heart, and two for folks that you know you need a lot of time, and three, it can get costly because many of the things that you need, or a lot of the information that's out there, um, years and years ago, you would actually have to contact the National Archives, or you would have to, you know, pay someone to do that for you to kind of be a runner of information. And now uh a lot of that is digitized, and you can find it online, sometimes behind a paywall, or if you have accounts through some of the more popular sites like Ancestry and My Heritage, um Family Tree, things of that nature. So while that makes it very inaccessible for people with not much money, uh, on the flip side, I kind of understand that they have to pay for the storage and the data and the subscriptions and things. I have thought about doing a whole informational series on how you can do this a little more inexpensively, but I think that the best way for anyone to start really is with your local library, with the library that is in your county, because nine times out of ten, there is somebody there that has genealogy expertise. Also, your library card, while you're in the library, often gives you free access to ancestry.com, which I think is kind of a great thing. Now, I've gotten comments like this before in the past. Um, people are really funny about that, right? Because they are very protective of their family history. And again, a lot of times you open things up and it's not how you thought it was. Another part of this is that not everybody has the ability to get to the library, so being in the library to access Ancestry is a little difficult. There are ways that you can do that. A lot of people are willing to share like their full membership to Ancestry as long as you don't mess with their family trees, and family groups will oftentimes get a membership that's greater. Now, there is a lot you can do with places like Family Search. Also, another great site is WikiTree. WikiTree is fantastic. You can get a lot of information there, and it is really kind of fun. They do little weekly challenges, like, are you, you know, can you make a real connection to this person or this person? So I'm guessing this week it's gonna it's going to have something to do with like how to find your Irish heritage and things like that. Um, but so you know, met my husband, he supports this. I start this journey and really start getting into it about 11 or 12 years ago, and then I decide dun dun dun, that I'm going to do a DNA test. And I used three different sites. I used Family Tree DNA, um, 23andMe, and Ancestry.com. Through that, I found family I didn't know I had, which was a first cousin. Um, but I also was able to make family connections that had a little bit more science-based information instead of just things on paper. It's very important here to also mention that there are some errors that can happen in testing, sometimes with medication. And sometimes they're uh, you know, when they start doing the ethnicity, there a lot of that there is a a plus or minus margin of error in that work. So just take everything. Sorry, I'm I'm a little clogged up because I keep getting swatted in the face with a tail. And while I'm not allergic to cats, um having one get you, she's definitely like, okay, could you stop talking now? She's a very quiet cat, so when you're talking, she gets very animated, which is basically her way of saying, could you just be quiet and let me sit on your lap? Um, so yeah, so I took these three tests and started learning a little bit more about my family's migration patterns and things like that. So the first thing that showed up was a lot of Scandinavian ancestry, which makes sense considering that my uh great-grandfather was Danish. That made sense, but then I started seeing other little things that connected to other people that had um kind of this heritage that went back to North Europe, broadly North European, and as the years have gone by and the testing has gotten a little better, you start to see a little bit more, like, oh hey, you have a lot of family from let's you know, let's Leeds, um, or you have uh family from Cornwall, or hey, you're starting to get more Scottish, or you're starting to get more Irish, and hey, this is how those people migrated. And here are the people that have said that they have a definite relationship with this person, and you are, and oh hey, and now you know these testing sites are like, well, you have a match with this historical area or this historical person, so that's that's a lot of fun, but again, that gets costly, so we go back to doing things on paper, and how can we validate that? And for me, I really wanted to travel this mother-to-mother-to-mother family line because I'm absolutely fascinated in genetics. I'm not a geneticist, um, I don't even play one on the internet, but uh genetics really helped my family find answers to health questions. So it was great for us to pay for out-of-pocket genetic genetic testing. Um, it's expensive. It's I wish it was available to everyone, but it is not. And oftentimes trying to get your physician or wellness to provellness provider to help you get that testing like through insurance or a low-cost service is not always easy. Um you know, this is this is not the time to talk about it. I'm just you know, I just am very fortunate and very lucky that the resources were available for that. Um, and in doing so, I started to deepen my research on family. So, really looking at things like death certificates. What did these people die of? Um, you know, what did the census look like? How many children did the women have? What was listed in historical documents? What can I find on places like Roots Web or WikiTree or whatever? What about the journey of these women? And my goal with Mom Strange Magic, which I'm gonna state this uh very clearly, um, is to travel back that mother line while I'm making things and helping people again to support my husband, to support my family, and to support going back through that mother line, um, and going back as far as I can trace with historical documents, which maybe one day will take me to a completely different country. Who knows? But for right now, there's enough information where I am located that it will keep me busy for many years. Because as I travel back through my grandmother and to my great-grandmother, to my great-great-grandmother, and to my great-great-great-grandmother, I begin to see a pattern, and I'm not including my own mother in this for my own reasons, um, but also because I my life was lived with her, so I know more about her. I don't know a whole lot about my grandmother. We didn't see her a lot when I was growing up. I know a little bit more about my great-grandmother because when she was um at a nursing home near us, I was able to spend time with her. And uh when I look at how she was and who she was during that time, um, and I just loved her dearly. When I was younger, I still love her now, that doesn't change. Um, you know, the things that she did and the things that she was and the stories that she told me, just of her time at that point. She didn't tell me anything about growing up, she didn't tell me anything about my grandmother, she didn't tell me anything about her life. Um, but she would tell me about crocheting and cross stitch and the books she was reading and the people that she met and getting her hair done and her nails done, just very wonderful conversations. And so that's where I started. I wanted to know a little bit more about who she was. And a few years ago, my mom gave me a bunch of things that had been passed down from her family. Um, pictures and things like that, genealogical information, just all kinds of stuff. Sadly, a lot of it was ruined during um some weather that we had in my area, and I wasn't able to salvage a lot of it. So, but what I do have is very dear to me. And one is a journal that was my great-grandmother's from 1929, and another is the burial garment of my great great-grandmother. In that box is a sash that says Truth Rebecca Lodge 5, and then I didn't know if it was a nine or a six, but just in the past week I have learned that it was a nine. So my great-great-grandmother belonged to Truth Rebecca Lodge 59 in Kentucky during a time when things like the Lexington paper called it secret societies. Uh, even now, um care ke uh caretenders, cemetery keepers, I don't know, the people that um work in the cemetery and keep track of the records, groundskeepers, all that. Um, whenever you are looking for that information, they do get a little bit like, uh, you know, like, well, it says here that your family member was part of this organization. So Truth Rebecca Lodge is the female kind of parallel companion organization to the International Order of Oddfellows. And my great-great-grandmother was a part of Truth Rebecca Lodge 59, which at that time gave women a little bit more autonomy and a little bit more sovereignty, and she was able to meet with others who came together to do service for the community, and I didn't really know what that would have looked like or what she would have done until I, again, this week, found out that she was a nurse, and she was a nurse during a TB explosion in Kentucky, and she nursed her family. Um, she nursed her, I'm guessing, her husband who who died of tuberculosis or consumption, and all of a sudden, y'all, it's like, why have I always wanted to help people? Why have I always felt a very strong pull to rural communities? Because my great-great-grandmother would have been serving uh families in rural Kentucky, she would have known her neighbors, she would have experienced the suffering that they were going through, she would have been able to speak their language, and you know, and then during that time, as all of that was going through, you know, she was having to take care of her own kids, and then her husband dies, and she's still got kids, and she's still got family, and she's a nurse, and she belongs to this organization, and everything is changing in the early 1900s in Kentucky. Um, you know, this is pre-uh depression, and you know, modern modern things are starting to come to Kentucky, and just oh my gosh. And then I learn about where she would have been living at the time, had Indian burial mounds, like mounds that were being leveled and raised so that people could have basements for their house. So she would be walking upon the sadness of that land of those of the original ancestors of the land, watching their sacred holy sites being desecrated and destroyed so that humans could move into modern life. And I mean, this really is the story of humans where we are all built on the um on the paths of our ancestors, on the sacred sides of our ancestors, those that came before us, you know, they planted the seeds, and you know, while this may be shocking now because we so much want to want to know. The stories of that. If you've researched or done any kind of you know educational dives into archaeology, you will know that many times cultures were built on top of each other. And so some of those artifacts from that area are at the University of Kentucky, which is I'm gonna I'm gonna get there, y'all. I'm gonna get there. Um, so yeah, so my uh great-great-grandmother, a member of this secret society, a nurse, and so much more. She also, okay, so I'm gonna throw this out here. In the late 1800s in Kentucky, women were still being tried, charged, and executed for witchcraft. Now, you don't see a lot of that history out there, and you know, everybody wants to be like, oh, I'm related to women at the Salem witch trials, blah blah blah. Um, but I don't think we all understand that even into uh the 1900s, my country's coming out, y'all. Um, even into the early the the late 1800s, early 1900s, if if somebody didn't like a woman, she be she could be charged with witchcraft, she could be jailed, she could have her land taken away, and this was particularly hard for widows and women that were aging, that maybe had a plot of land that had been bequeathed to her and her living children from her husband. So if you wanted to develop or if you needed more farmland, the the great way to get rid of granny so-and-so, to get rid of that granny woman who not only probably helped birth your children and kept everybody alive during epidemics, um, that plot of land, maybe it was next to a river. Maybe it had a good set of wells, whatever. The it was the the ground was fertile, and so uh you would get someone that's like, yep, I saw Greenie, um, I saw Greenie Kim out in the full moon uh rubbing a potato on the wart of uh farmer Johnson or whatever, and she's a witch. And even though the other people in that community would have known these things, they would have not only had access to the folklore, they would have had access to the knowledge of healing plants and healing work. Um I'll be danged if you if you wanted that property or if you wanted something, the best way to do it was to call that lady a witch. Um, or if you were too smart, or if you were too pretty. And so my great-grandmother, and specifically my great-great-grandmother would have been alive during this time. So imagine, if you will, um 1910, here's my my great-great-grandmother um out doing nursing work, and really honestly, let's just let's just call it right now. She would have been a granny woman, she was a healer woman, but her craft had become legitimized because of the need in the community. So she might have cut, you know, her my her my third great-grandmother, her mother, again, grew up in a rural community that um had all of this. Now, here's here's where I'm going to to tell you something. All of those women were Christian, they were Baptist, and the Baptist faith back then was not how we see it today. Okay, so you have to have a love of spirituality and religion to kind of have an understanding, which guess what your girl does. Um, and it makes sense because of of what I know, right? And these these women were the housewives for their husbands that were day laborers and farmers, and it's just like now I understand everything. I understand why I prefer living in rural areas, even though I am seen as being someone with 14 heads and 92 eyeballs, because you know, I went to school, I have an education, um, you know, I'm I'm a little weird, and so you know, I come into a modern-day rural community with the memories of my ancestors, and modern rural communities these days don't operate the same as they did two and three hundred years ago, specifically 200, because I'm I'm I'm back to like the um I'm currently in 1860 right now. Um, and I'm sorry, 1851. So I'm in the mid-1800s with my research. And uh this week I'm gonna be working on my fourth great grandmother. And if y'all could see right now what was going on, um I I got this cat who just will not stop jumping on me. So yes, and sorry, I it's just like there's always cats, there's always cats, and so these women, right, they operated as the as the as the greeny women that they were, um, even if they had young children, and they survived, they helped their family stay fed, they got the water, they kept the small family garden, they knew the plants. Um, they knew things like Joe Pieweed as gravel root. If you got um scourge of the bladder, right? Which would happen if you didn't have access to clean water, if you didn't have the things that you need, you would get dehydrated and you would get kidney stones, creating kidney issues in your family that could be carried down genetically, yada yada yada. Um and you know, learning all of this has brought me a sense of clarity because the things that have made me weird my whole entire life to people, one, why would I have a deep love of rural communities? Why do I feel overwhelmingly pulled to serve in rural communities? How come I have memories of hills and mountains that I have never seen? Why do I know the beauty of making a prayer shawl or an Afghan for somebody that can keep them warm or provide them comfort? Why did I, you know, how did I know as a kid that that when somebody passed away, this is what you did? I as a kid, even really without understanding why, knew the importance of things like telling the bees, which is a tradition of, you know, it's a folk tradition that when someone died, you would go to the beekeeper and you would have them tell the bees about the bet about the death. How did I know about sitting with people? How did I know about he how did I know about these things? Well, y'all, my second great-grandmother passed that down to me. And it carried through because, you know, epigenetics. Um, my great-great-grandmother would have been carrying, right? When she was carrying my great-grandmother, and my great-grandmother formed to be a person that reproduces if you know as a female, she would have had all the eggs that she was gonna have, right? So my grandmother would have been in there. And you know, if you want to like start getting super meta, that meant my mother would have been in there. So all the things that my great-great-grandmother was experiencing would have been felt genetically, right? So it's nature and nurture together, and there's a great study about um occupational genetic memory and just all kinds of things, and also as well as how trauma and environment shapes genetics. I mean, you all could just you could research that till you're till the cows come home. Um but underneath all of that were these women that had a deep sense of empathy, a deep sense of caring, a deep sense of service, and would have had, I believe, a great intuition, and not like I can predict the lottery numbers, but they would have been intuitively guided to use the information that they had learned along with the things that they had seen to help other people. And I have danced around that my whole life. I had issues where I didn't think I was worthy, I had some things to deal with, I had some personal responsibilities to accept, I had all kinds of things, I had my own family to raise, and now that I'm here, all my kids are adults. I'm in a place where I can have a little bit more freedom, a little more, a little more liberty to do things that are of interest to me, and I'm able to see that how did I get to be the person that I am? I did it because I am standing in a line of women who put their shoulders into it and survived. And I don't know if they were liked, I don't know if you know, I don't I don't know anything about who they were personally, but I want to know and I want to tell their story, and I want to walk where they walked, and I want to help other people do that as well. So it's like here on the eve of coming back to Mom's Strange Magic, of being here. This is the 27th day, and tomorrow is the 28th day, and it's a new moon, and you know, all these things, and it's also a day where I'm going to celebrate being with the person that gave me the grace and the space and the love to have Mom Strange Magic to be Mom Strange Magic, and he is the he is the person that named the work that I do. He's like, Well, you know, that's just Mom Strange Magic, and now I can put my finger on the history and what I know of the journey so far, of how I got to be this way. And not that it's just my ancestors, and I'm not coping their vibe or co-opting their path, but somewhere in the very fibers of my being is the memory of my great-grandmother watching her mom be in service and heal and help and nourish and listen. Somewhere in me is that energy of my great-great-grandmother serving and helping and nourishing and listening to people. And then even further back is my third great-grandmother, who not only experienced living in the time of the Civil War in a northern part of Kentucky, which would have been probably union leaning, but if you know anything about Kentucky, um it's a bore it was a border state. So, I mean, you could have one person that was, you know, for the northern ideology on one part of your street, and your neighbor would be on the southern side of ideology. And, you know, this was a time of great upheaval. And I haven't even, you know, and I'm gonna walk past you know through my whole line because I want to find these ancestors, you know, the husbands and the and the the male, and and and I will get to my father's side too, but uh y'all, my my dad's family was Mormon, and I don't have any uh there's no genealogical mysteries there. So, you know, again, could that be a whole podcast? Sure. Will I do that podcast? Who knows? Um we just don't know. Um and so yeah, here I am on the press of a precipice of celebrating two moments of my life. One that gave me a sense of security and joy and love and support so that I could get to the point where I am now, and another that is where I just couldn't not be who I was anymore, and I had to stop trying to put myself into boxes that were comfortable for others, and doing that was not good for me, and it was not good for anybody else around me, and I have a lot of sadness about that because I was constantly trying to put myself in a place that was not for me, and hurt feelings happen, relationships changed, and again, it that a lot of that's on me. Um, you know, not absolving other people of the things that they did that were also hurtful to myself and to themselves, but to say that these, you know, sometimes sometimes we do things we don't quite understand, and we we have uh it's just kind of a wild experience, um, to to really have some reckoning with that and to sit with that and and and to grow from it, and just to know that these are things that will not happen again, and you know, uh just once more for the record, which I'll probably say again, is that I I wish that no one had ever been hurt by those experiences, or my reactions to those experiences, or the reactions that other people had um in that experience that caused me, you know, all is forgiven, everything is good, blank slate, tabla rasa, all of it. Um very good people um do really weird things when they have challenges in their life, and that's just not about me, that is everybody. We all do it, that's a human thing, it's a modern human thing. I don't know. I wasn't back in the past, so maybe our ancestors did it too, regardless. Um, so yeah, it is a day where I am excited to move forward, and I don't know where it will take me. I'm not sure what other things I'm going to uncover, but you know, the the one little part about this that I have not yet mentioned is every time I heal something from that mother line, it makes a change in the lives of my children. And it's not like I'm like, oh, I'm doing this because I'm going to be the mom, the blah, blah, blah. Um, I'm doing this because maybe the women in my past did not have the opportunity to do that. Um, maybe they didn't have somebody to listen to them. I don't know how their relationships were. I mean, at that time we didn't really get divorced. Um, the only way to get rid of a, you know, to not be in a relationship with a husband was if you had a compassionate family and um get rid of that sounds nefarious. If you wanted to get away from a husband that was not good to you, that was very difficult to do. You you couldn't you couldn't do that. It was kind of unheard of. And if you didn't have the support of your family, if you didn't have the reason, I mean it just really didn't happen. So these women often stayed in relationships that were not good for them. Is that how it was for my family? My mother line? I don't know, but I think I'm gonna probably find out. Um, there is a little bit of a mystery where in some of the census, um, my third great-grandmother listed her husband as her brother, which is interesting. What was he hiding from? I wonder. Just like uh, and and why did the census taker not say, like, so ma'am, where is your husband? Where did he go? Why he not here? So, um, yeah, so you know, it's it is it is the you know, that third great grandmother that went through the Civil War and all these, I don't know. It's it's it's histories, mysteries. Um in conclusion, thank you for being here. Thank you to the folks that have left comments, thank you to those that have reached out and said, you know, things like this is really interesting, things people that have given me tips on finding a better microphone or letting me know that the things fade in and out. Um I'm working on that. You know, I I didn't just step out into this space with uh a lot of money. I didn't win the lottery and decide, hey, I'm gonna do this. I did this because the untold story within me and that I carry in my mother line decided that it was time to come out. And so here I am doing my best. And um I'm just really grateful for those of you that are listening and grateful for those that have asked questions and given me tips and advice. So uh yeah, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. None of this would be possible without I felt like I'm I'm getting ready to do a PB without viewers like you, without listeners like you. Anyway, um I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day, and I hope that you are able to find answers for your family, and I hope that you have peace and that you are well. It's been a it's just it's just wonderful to be here with you. So it's me signing off, and I will see you next week.