Whenever I manage to escape the city (Jersey City, that is; I escape New York City daily, and yawp triumphantly in the PATH station every time I do.) and visit my family (besides the benevolent and bedeviling aunt and uncle I reside with), I try to split my time evenly between three simple activities: sleeping, eating, and hanging out with my sisters. Often, I manage to do all these quite well, ie. with little time for doing anything else. This was almost the case over the Easter weekend.
First, my grandfather’s insistence on serving meals both larger and more frequently than I am used to deliciously achieved my “eating” goal—and may have actually added a pound or two to my stickly frame. And second, my littlest sister’s endless enthusiasm and glee to have me home ensured hours of playing games and eating Easter candy, studying U.S. geography and checking out her award-winning project on Arizona, or just loafing around watching River Monsters—and even a Lindsey Lohan movie (one I’d never seen before—can you believe that?!). However, the first pillar of my long-weekend plan—sleep—suffered doubly from my proclivity to stay up late and my grandparents’ proclivity to rise with the sun. And amid all this, I cavorted with several young girl cousins, took a nature walk with my lone male cousin on this side of the family (whereupon he told me about all the dangerous creatures that inhabit the southwest United States—including the dreaded chupacabra, so this six-year-old definitely knows his stuff), and participated in an embarrassing Easter egg hunt for the older children (me, my eldest younger sister, and her boyfriend)—embarrassing not only in principle, but in the fact that I couldn’t manage to find a single egg on my own. All in all, pretty much what I expected and desired from such a weekend. But the most profound and enlightening experience was an enjoyable surprise.
After lunch one day, my grandmother and her sister sat at the dining room table, leafing through one of their mother’s decaying photo albums. Attracted by the seventy-something-year-old snapshots and an opportunity to learn my family’s history, I joined them for a lesson. The photographic collection from my mother’s mother’s family is surprisingly large, though it has not been kept in the best condition or state or organization, ie. dates and identifying captions. But, between my grandmother’s and great aunt’s recollections and the dozens of black-and-white images, I could grasp a better sense of one quarter of my family tree: a Slovak-Hungarian tribe from in and around Youngstown, Ohio. But let me share some particularly endearing and curious anecdotes from my forbears.
From one series of photographs, I discovered that my grandmother was as fond of dancing as many of her young granddaughters—and that, as a four-year-old, she eerily resembled one of those cousins. On another page, I learned that there was a penchant for nicknames back in the Thirties and Forties, including one of my grandmother’s great aunts, who went only by “Nanya”—her proper name forgotten and replaced by the word for aunt in Hungarian.
Also in this vein, I learned that the man appearing throughout in the Army uniform was called “Uncle Russian,” despite that fact that he was of Hungarian extraction. And, according to both my family’s account and a newspaper clipping, this man (who was really my grandmother's uncle, named John) became such an avid golfer after the war that he hardly ever took a break from the game for winter—and actually grew a thick beard to both protect his face on the course and to hold his tees.
I just love these kind of stories and eccentricities, just as much as looking at the photographs themselves—viewing lives so distantly past, yet captured on paper and in memories; lives connected to my own, in ways I’m only just beginning to understand. Like that of my great-grandmother Helen, whom did I know when she was living, but who I now saw as a beaming nineteen-year-old posing with brothers and parents, with no hint of a thought in her head of the two women sitting next to me. And fortunately, those two are not satisfied with the incomplete knowledge of their family they have carried with them from childhood. Speaking about this just last night with my grandmother, she mentioned that she would be contacting some cousins of hers next time she found herself in western Pennsylvania, and might be able to elicit from them the forgotten name of her great aunt. And some of her preliminary research has proven that her father’s father (my great-great-grandfather) had already arrived in this country from Slovakia by 1910. And after she completes the genealogy of her side of the family, then it’s on to my grandfather and his Polish forbears. Oh boy, now there’s a project …
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