Beginning March 2nd, 2020 the Mailing Lists functionality on RootsWeb will be discontinued. Users will no longer be able to send outgoing emails or accept incoming emails. Additionally, administration tools will no longer be available to list administrators and mailing lists will be put into an archival state.
Administrators may save the emails in their list prior to March 2nd. After that, mailing list archives will remain available and searchable on RootsWeb
Page 1
[Cleaver] ANNOUNCEMENT: Scheduled Downtime
by List user
This is an announcement from Rootsweb:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Starting at 8 a.m. PST Friday, February 23, RootsWeb will begin a planned
temporary downtime for maintenance of its servers and hosting process. It
will limit this downtime as much as possible, and will return with increased
performance and reliability for future growth.
In the meantime, please take time to visit RootsWeb.com 's sister sites --
Ancestry.com and FamilyHistory.com -- where you will find additional tools
such as message boards, communities, and databases to help you in the search
for your ancestors.
Thank you for your patience.
--The RootsWeb Staff
19 years
[Cleaver] "Sunday Afternoon Rocking"
by List user
From: jan, unicorn(a)sun-spot.com (j)
I Once Knew a Mountain Woman (from the "Sunday Afternoon Rocking" series)
When we met, two worlds were destined to collide…and grow richer because of
one another.
We sat alone on a summer night, gazing at the stars dusting the rich velvet
of a mountain's sky, and she turned to me and said, "Why would you want to
go to school now? You are married." Nothing in the realm of my experience
at that point in my life had prepared me for such a notion as this…and I
tried politely to cover my shock, and to explain why an education was so
important to me. I had never had to explain that before. Perhaps she had
never had to ask the question before.
She would ask that question again when I was a young mother with a
career. "Why would you work now? You are a mother." And nothing I could
explain about the times and necessity, about the reason for working, about
the years of preparation or the dreams, could she understand. And as I
grew older, I wondered if perhaps, just perhaps…she had been right.
The woman of another realm of experience was there every time I needed
her. And I for her. I it was that she called to deliver her to the
hospital for the birth of her own seventh child, and I who called her
husband to tell him of the birth. "Birthing" was a time "of women". She
hovered over me when I expected my own, warning me against sights or
activities that might "mark the child", admonishing my husband to heed
"cravings". I grew used to the superstitions, and at times, came to
welcome them. A frantic young mother with a sick feverish child will not
argue with a prayer cloth pinned to her child's night shirt, and she will
grasp at homemade salves when drug stores are closed.
She spoke words long out of fashion and sprinkled her daily conversations
with superstitions and thoughts that fascinated me, and I realized a link
with a world fast disappearing from the mountains her ancestors had called
home for two hundred years. I sat listening to her stories, writing down
names, recording what she used only her mind to record. She did not
understand why I would write, but she understood I would listen.
This woman who could neither read nor write amazed me in other ways as
well. A bountiful meal she could prepare before I could plan a menu…and
never use a recipe. She could remember dates, directions, names, events
with astonishing clarity, and after a bit I came to understand that in
compensation for her illiteracy she had developed an astonishing memory to
take the place of what most of us depend upon our ability to read.
I could not understand why one so handicapped would not understand nor
value education. She could not understand why it was important.
I marveled at her ability to stay calm in the face of disaster, for it
seemed to me that disaster courted this family, so different from what I
had always known. I would wonder at what I perceived as a lack of planning
or caring. I would ask myself time and again why a family did not reach
for goals that would put such disasters out of the constant thread of their
lives. Time and again, I would ask myself what it was in this woman that
she seemed to "give up so easily"…and then I would wonder if it was in fact
a "giving up", a "resignation to fate." Was it perhaps…faith? I wondered
at the manner in which she could so simply say, "I gave it to the Lord". I
never fully knew the answer, or if it were a combination of all of those
things.
She died much as she had lived. As a young woman, she had developed a
serious disease, and all hope for her recovery was given up. When the
doctors told her to prepare for death, she "gave it to the Lord". She
promised Him, she told me, that if He would but allow her to live to see
her children grown, the next time He called, she would be ready, and would
go without a whimper. Her recovery was called a miracle, and the woman who
entered the church doors unable to propel herself alone by any other means
than crawling, stood and walked out on her own two feet that night. Seven
children she raised, and the last born when she already had been a
grandmother six times over. And when the last was raised, the Lord
called. She received the news stoically, and remembered her long ago
promise. She rejected life prolonging treatments, and the terminal disease
did not take long to claim her. At the end, she reacted typically, and
rejected the sterile and impersonal hospital environment in favor of her
own bed in her own home. She would die with the strength and in the old
fashioned manner in which she had lived, and in the only manner that she
felt the "right way" to go. She told her children and her grandchildren
that when the time came, they were to be there, young and old. It was
right, she told them, that she die in her own bed with her family
surrounding her, all of them. And so she did.
When we met, two worlds of two strong women were destined to collide. They
collided without harsh words or ill feelings, without tears or anger…but
they collided all the same. Never did she fully understand me or my world,
but I think she came to appreciate that I was as strong as she, in a world
fast taking the place of the one that she had spent all her days in. Never
did I fully understand her, but I think knowing her, appreciating
her…became a reason for my strength.
Remembering,
jan
Copyright ©2000JanPhilpot
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
19 years
[Cleaver] "Sunday Afternoon Rocking"
by List user
From: Jan, unicorn(a)sun-spot.com (j)
Valentines Through the Generations (from the "Sunday Afternoon Rocking"
series)
The story goes that she was fifteen, he sixteen. They married not for the
sake of love, but to give his younger siblings a home. So it was that two
mere children took up housekeeping to raise a house full of children. They
grew to love one another, to become old together and to have twelve
children of their own. They were my great grandparents.
Pa said he and my grandmother married in 1910, when her family was about to
migrate to Texas. She had been smitten by Cupid's arrows and did not wish
to leave her beau. Making their decision, they set out down the road, and
on the way met the preacher. They married, he said, in the very buggy that
sat for all of my memory in the shed out in the pasture. They were my
grandparents.
A wonder the marriage of the next generation ever came about. He had come
to the city to work in a factory, and took his lunch in the same tiny
corner diner that many of the time did. She was the daughter of the owner
and did not much cotton to the attitude of the handsome cocky young man who
swaggered in, took his seat on a barstool and told her to get him a
hamburger and "not to cremate it in the process". Without a word, she
flipped it on the grill, flipped it over, plastered the raw meat between
two buns and then asked if it was raw enough to suit him. They were my
parents.
I have my own love story. Two of them actually. And although the first had
not an entirely happy ending, it had a wonderful beginning, one I clasp in
my heart and remember looking at my children, I am very glad happened. And
were it not for a washing machine, a Chicken Little bookmarker, a Scrabble
game, the definition of "serendipity" and a shooting star, the second could
not be told. And told they will be, both of the stories, to the
grandchildren that ask the same questions I asked the generations that
preceded me.
So it goes through the generations, a story for each of them, a story that
is the beginning of descendants that follow. And perhaps that is the
reason they find it of such interest...had Cupid's arrow not found its
mark, they would not have been. Or perhaps…it is just that all the world
loves a love story.
Behind each of those faces looking out at us from pictures and in memory is
a story, behind each scrap of paper we find that proves an ancestor married
an ancestress, is a story. The stories are not documented in dusty old
marriage records with their crumbling yellowed pages. They are not
recorded on the pages of a family Bible, and they are only to be guessed at
looking at the gray hair and lined faces of old photographs. But for those
of us who have known our own stories, however they may have ended or began,
there is an understanding that the story is there. If those eyes in a
photograph could come to life just for a minute there would be a faraway
dreamy look within them as they told the story of how it came to be that
you are, and I am.
Happy Valentine's Day,
jan
Copyright ©2000JanPhilpot
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
19 years
Page 1
Next Page