"The Waiting Room," continued

You can read more of the prologue to my book, The Waiting Room on Family Wisdom.

My Book: "The Waiting Room"

My book is now up on Amazon.  It's a memoir of the 18 months I spent with my parents when they were suffering from incurable and devastating diseases.  It's sad, but I believe the story, and especially the ending, will inspire you. The story begins forty years earlier.  Here's a sample:

There was something about mid-afternoon—the way the sun reflected off the Spanish Colonial architecture, the view of the Pacific on a smogless day, or the chapel bells ringing on the hour—that always lifted my spirits.  Classes had ended for the day and I was free to read a novel in the shade of a live oak, meander across the elegant campus, or gaze at the forested canyons below. Each time I strolled through the arched colonnades on my way to the library, I celebrated my good fortune.  There I was, the first in my family to attend college, and not just any college, but a magnificent cocoon high in the Santa Monica Mountains, far from the turmoil that touched so many college campuses in 1965.  I was just eighteen, an idealistic and naïve young woman who still believed in dreams, miracles, and happily ever after.  That anything could go wrong was beyond my imagination.

Then on Thursday, just before dinner, Mom called. 

"Come home this weekend," she said soberly.  "We need to talk."

"About what?" 

"Not over the phone," she said. 

A stream of possibilities flowed through my mind—none of them good. I wondered if Dad had lost his job and I'd have to leave school. My scholarship only covered tuition, and without Dad's income, we could never afford room and board.

"Can you at least give me a hint?" I said.

"It's about Terry," she replied.  "Will you be able to find a ride?"

When I told her I could, she abruptly ended the call, leaving me to wonder what had happened in the weeks I'd been away—she hadn't said anything about my younger brother in her weekly letters—but before I could think more about it, my friends breezed by on their way to the cafeteria and asked me to join them. 

Fortunately, my roommate was planning her own trip home for the weekend and agreed to give me a lift, so after Friday morning classes I threw my books and overnight bag into the backseat of her Volkswagen Beetle, and we joined the rush hour traffic leaving Los Angeles for Orange County.  I walked in the door around five-thirty, parked myself on the turquoise sofa in front of the television, and waited for Mom to come home from work.  One hour later, she sat across from me, underneath the white balloon lamp that cast eerie shadows on her face, causing her to look much older than her thirty-nine years. She stared at the floor for a moment, and when she looked up there were tears in her eyes.

"Your brother's sick," she said.

"What do you mean?" I said. 

She put her head down again but didn't speak.

"I'm sure he'll be all right," I said a little too hastily.

"No he won’t," she replied. Then she took a breath and said, "He has cancer."

Like a rogue wave catching me off guard, her words sent me reeling.  I shook my head, certain I had misunderstood.

"What did you say?"

"Terry has cancer. There's a lump on his neck, and the doctor did a biopsy. We got the results yesterday.  He has cancer of the lymph system," she said, speaking slowly and dabbing her eyes with the handkerchief she always kept tucked in the sleeve of her sweater.    

"No, Mom," I said, rushing in with the infinite wisdom of an eighteen year old. "He’s just sixteen.  You need to talk to a different doctor."

"The doctor is certain," she said.  "Terry has cancer.  And there’s no cure."

The wave was pulling me under, stealing air from my lungs and immersing me in darkness, but I struggled to the surface, desperate to get my bearings and stand on solid ground.

Terry had been tired lately, Mom said.  He'd had some fevers and nose bleeds.  Then he found the lump on his neck—the most ominous sign of all—and the diagnosis was now certain: my brother had Hodgkin's disease, a cancer of the lymph system. I didn’t even know what the lymph system was.

"There has to be some kind of treatment," I said. 

"We’re going to Long Beach next week to see a specialist. Maybe," she said, "he can give us some time."

"How much time?"

"If we're lucky, we might have a few years."

This couldn’t be happening.  I closed my eyes, shook my head, and willed time to go backward, back to the ride home with my roommate when we talked about our boyfriends, back to this morning when my biggest concern was passing my weekly French quiz. Time wouldn’t cooperate.

My mother composed herself and stood up.  Barely five foot two, she seemed suddenly smaller, struggling to manage the tragic burden that had just fallen on her.   She didn’t hug me, or look to me for comfort, or acknowledge her pain, though I knew it was there, ripping her to pieces. Instead, she walked slowly into the kitchen to start dinner, keeping herself busy as she always did whenever painful emotions threatened to engulf her, then returned to add one more thing.

"Terry’s out with his friends," she said.  "He doesn’t know the results of the biopsy yet.  He has no idea…"  She stood silently for half a minute, choking back tears.  "So I want you to control your feelings when he comes home."

Solving the mystery of Latin records

The parish records (births, marriages, christenings) for my husband's family in Croatia are mostly written in Latin, though some are written in Italian and a few in Croatian.  Having taken four years of Latin in high school and two years in college, I can read some of the entries.  However, my skills are rusty and I had forgotten how the endings of names can differ depending on the relationship of one person to another, and this had me confused regarding the names of my husband's ancestors. It was another mystery to be solved.

For example, many men in my husband's family are named "Anton" which is the Croatian form of Anthony. Anthony is also my husband's name and he is named after his grandfather Anton.  In the records of his ancestors, however, the name is often written "Antonius," the Latin form.  Occasionally the name was written in the Italian version, "Antonio."  This was because the island of Brac, his ancestral homeland, was frequently under the rule of Venice, and some of the priests were Italian. However, at times, the name is written "Antoni" or even "Antonii" which puzzled me. 

Then I found a website that reminded me of why the name might be spelled with one or two i's at the end.  This ending signifies that the individual is the father of a previously named individual.  So if I were to write my husband's name in Latin, it would simply be "Antonius."  If I were to write in Latin about "Matthew, son of Anthony," it would read "Mattheus filius Antoni (or Antonii)." Since christening records and marriage records list the parents of the child to be christened or the individuals to be married, it would be common to see the father's name ending in i or ii. 

So now when I see Antonii or Antoni, I realize my researcher was simply copying records exactly as the names were written in Latin, and probably didn't realize the endings represented a relationship between two individuals in the record. The actual name of the individual would be Antonius in Latin, and Anton in Croatian.

Mystery solved!

The Dangers of Childbirth

Our ancestors generally had very large families, with as many as a dozen or more children in some families.  And it is quite miraculous that so many children and mothers survived childbirth, especially when you think of all the things that can go wrong including breech presentation, incompatible Rh factors and infection. 

Although the majority of my female ancestors survived childbirth, I have come across a number who didn't.  One was my grand aunt Rebecca Shaw Waggoner, my grandmother's younger sister.  I remember my grandmother talking about this with my mother.   Becky was apparantly Rh Negative and her baby Rh positive.  Since this was her second child, she had already built up antibodies in her own blood to Rh positive blood, but of course routine tests were not done for blood factors then so Becky and her husband had no way of knowing how dangerous a second pregnancy could be, especially if the second child was also Rh positive.  Both Becky and the baby died from this incompatibility. 

I discovered another death related to childbirth several months ago.  Bridget, the wife of my great grand uncle, Edward Brennan, had already had seven healthy children when she died along with her eighth child.  This appears to have been due to an illness or infection but since this was in 1914, when medical science was very primitive, we cannot know for certain the exact cause of the deaths.

Just today, I discovered a third death which I believe is related to childbirth. I discovered it by accident.  Elizabeth Wagner, my second great grandmother, died on August 1, 1864 and in the 1870 census her husband John is remarried to a woman named Sophia.  At least, it appears to be the same John Wagner who was once married to Elizabeth, as the children's names are the same.

I began searching in the cemetery records of Delphos, Ohio, where the Wagners lived, to see what I could find out about a Sophia Wagner.  (In the St. John's cemetery records, the names of spouses or parents of the deceased are often listed.) I couldn't find a Sophia Wagner, but I did a Wagner infant.  The child's name was Michael John Wagner and he died in November, 1864. He was listed as the son of Elizabeth and John.   I then looked at his birth date:  August 1, 1864, the same date Elizabeth died.  I think it is reasonable to assume that Elizabeth died in childbirth, and the infant died a few months later. 

I can't help but be impressed with the courage of these women.  In the days before antibiotics, sterile environments, modern medicine and the drug Rhogam that helps prevent deaths due to Rh incompatibility (I was a beneficiary of this life-saving medication) women faced danger with each pregnancy. They are true heroes.

Family Size

I went sailing a week ago, and I was talking about genealogy to one of my fellow sailors.  When I mentioned that my husband is descended from at least 3 Mayflower passengers, he asked how many descendants of the Mayflower passengers there were.  He imagined there must be a large number.  I told him I didn't know exactly, but I had read somewhere that it was in the millions.  Even though only 50 of the 100 original passengers survived the first year, those 50 went on to have many children, and over the years, the number has increased geometrically.   Of course, up until the 1960s, when the birth control pill was developed, most families were large.  In my background as well as my husband's, the number of children in families was rarely less than 5, and often more than 10.  Many men married several times - often because a wife had died in childbirth -  and had multiple families.  It wasn't unusual for a man to have as many as 15 or even 20 children from 3 different wives.

Today, the situation is very different.  It is a rare family that has more than 2 children.  People marry later these days and for financial and other reasons, limit the number of children they want to raise.  Of course, our ancestors did not have the means to limit their families, unless they chose to forego marital relations, but obviously most of them didn't.  It wasn't only the absence of reliable birth control that led to large families, however.  It was also the need for many children to help run the farms, or the obedience to religious directives to "increase and multiply," or simply the belief that children were a gift from God.

Today, we're concerned about how expensive it is to raise children and we worry about overpopulation.  Women pursue careers along with men and no longer think about child-rearing and housewifery as a lifelong occupation.  Raising children is, instead, something one does in one's spare time, or in addition to climbing the career ladder.  Some couples choose not to have children at all.  This is neither right nor wrong.  Each generation has its own culture, challenges, and desires, and the smaller families of today fit with the values and needs of our times.

It will change things for genealogists, however.  There will be fewer siblings to research, and it it will take a lot longer for an original group of 50 people to produce over a million descendants.

Yeseta - Jescheta - Jeseta - Gescheta

The above title lists 4 different spellings of my husband's paternal grandmother's maiden name, or the name of one of his paternal great grandfathers.

His grandmother Madelena's father was born in what is now the Czech Republic. (Back then, it was called "Bohemia.")  His name was Tomas Jeseta and his birthdate is 10 Nov 1851.  He met his wife, Antonia Mladinic, who was working in Bohemia as a cook, and they were married in Budva, Montenegro on 24 Nov 1874. They then moved to Brac, Croatia where Antonia and all her siblings were born. Until now, no one in the family has had any written information regarding the ancestors of Tomas Jeseta.

Two months ago, I hired a researcher in the Czech Republic who has just sent me his report.  Most of the records come from Roman Catholic parishes, and included in dates of births, baptisms and marriages are the occupations or social status of some of those listed. The record is difficult to read as some of the words are in German and some in Czech, but my researcher provided a guide to interpretation.

And so, for the first time in over 100 years, my husband's family will now know that Tomas Jesta's parents (my husband's great great grandparents) were named Matej Jeseta and Alzbeta Pechkova (Elisabeth Bechek or Pechek in German)  and his great great grandparents Martin Jeseta, Anna Hanusova, Kaspar Pechek and Barbora Berankova. The will also know that Matej was a charcoal burner by occupation and that Kaspar Pechek was a weaver. We already knew that Tomas was a shoemaker.

It seems that most of Tomas's ancestors were either farmers or middle class townspeople, living in one of several small villages or burghs, and whose addresses consisted of a number signifying a house, followed by the name of the town. (My researcher warned me that the numbers may have changed since the 1700's and 1800's when these records were written in the parish registers.)

There is much to pore over in these records, and I am anxious to put the names up on the family tree and share them with everyone.

It was definitely worth the expense.
 

Latest news from the Wrocklage - Esch Families

One of the most rewarding aspects of genealogy work is finding long lost (or previously unheard of) cousins.  And even better is being on the receiving end of their generous sharing of family details you did not have. Recently a 4th cousin contacted me through a comment on this blog and has shared exciting information with me.

As I wrote in a previous post, I have been trying to figure out some details regarding my 3rd great grandfather Christian Mathias Wrocklage, whose given surname was Esch. I had earlier speculated that he might have been adoped as I could not understand why he had changed his name from Esch to Wrocklage. As it turns out, his wife's maiden name was Wrocklage and in order to keep the farm after her father died, it had to pass into someone's hands whose name was Wrocklage.  Her older brother had already left the farm, married a woman and changed his name to hers so they could inherit her father's farm, so Christian changed his name to Wrocklage so that he, his wife and her younger siblings would not be kicked off the land.  This was apparently the law in Germany - you had to keep property in the family name.

I have also learned that Christian had three wives.  With his first wife, Anna Catharina Wrocklage, he had 4 children, one dying at birth.  With his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Gerdeman, he had 7 children, 2 of whom died young.  Then he married a third time and had another daughter.  With his 3rd wife and youngest children he emigrated to America in about 1845, and settled near some of his older children who had already arrived. Unfortunately, he and his wife both died the following year. 

Theodore Wrocklage, Christian's oldest son, was a founder of the city of Delphos, Ohio, along with a Catholic priest, Fr. John Otto Bredeick and his brother, Ferdinand Bredeick, and Bernard Esch, whom I assume to be related to Theodore (perhaps a cousin) as he has the same last name as Christian, before he legally changed it to Wrocklage.  

Now I am going to start searching for the Esch family in Germany and see if I can learn who Bernard is.