The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
Don't rely on memory, write down those genealogical gems
This story was published June 25, 2000
The first three rules of genealogy are write it down, write it down and write it down.
I suppose we might trace my entry into genealogy to the day I bought a spiral, school-lined notebook and started jotting down answers to questions I asked my Grandpa C.C. Day.
That would have been in late 1958, when I returned from Japan. Grandpa was about 91 years old.
Surely I bought the notebook at the behest of my maternal Grandma Pearl Willis, who first turned my attention to genealogical research.
I greatly appreciate having taken those sparse notes on Grandpa Day's early life and family connections. Recently, I was given good reason why I should have taken a lot more notes.
I especially regret not having taken notes on the stories my stepfather, Chester Vinnedge, told about his early life. He served in the Civilian Conservation Corps, but I don't know where and records of CCC members are few and far between.
The importance of writing things down was dramatically brought home by recent discussions on the Day family e-mail list.
First, we discovered considerable variety in stories that we seven siblings tell about Grandpa Day's blind eye. We all remember his glass eye, but accounts of how he came to have a glass eye varied broadly.
Some of the younger siblings thought Grandpa had a cataract operation that had gone bad, and that this occurred in relatively recent times. Like about 60 years ago!
But the account told by my older brother Charlie and me - being older, wiser and better-looking - prevailed.
Grandpa had strabismus (crossed eyes). At some point, he had surgery for the condition and as a complication lost the sight in one of his eyes.
But even with our venerable memories, we two oldest siblings aren't sure whether Grandpa had the surgery as a boy or as a young man. But we are agreed that it was a long time before we were born.
Grandpa was born in 1867 and lived in Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas and Colorado as a boy.
I asked the surgeon who corrected one of my grandson's strabismus how old this surgical intervention for strabismus is, and he said it was being performed in the Midwest during the 1870s.
I figure that's when Grandpa probably had his surgery. But we'll never know, because we didn't write it down!
Incidentally, he obtained the glass eye later in life when he got glaucoma in his bad eye.
We got into another discussion about my stepfather's blind eye. All the siblings agree that he lost his eye when he got battery acid in it while working on a car. Like Grandpa Day, he had it removed later in life when it began bothering him.
I remember it paining him on a trip we made from Kennewick to Crown Point, Ind., in 1953. Come to think of it, I wish I'd made a note on when we took that long trip by car, but I think it was 1953.
Anyway, I seem to remember Chet saying that the accident that cost him the sight of one eye occurred in Chicago when he was a teen-ager or young man, helping a friend work on his car. Some of my siblings think it happened much later, after he moved out to Washington and that he was working on his own car.
We'll never know.
Sure wish someone had written it down.
These are just a couple of simple examples of why it is important to write things down. Memories are too faulty.
Sometimes the consequences of not writing things down are far greater than these examples. You never know.
But one thing you can count on - people take their memories to the grave with them.
If they don't leave a written record, sayonara, as we used to say in Japan.