My parents didn’t talk or share about family history. It was as if all appeared in a puff of smoke, the only significant history was their now. One of my father’s brothers spent 30 to 40 years in prison for armed robbery and I found out about it only through extended family scuttlebutt when I was close to retirement age. My mother had a brother, a Navy Corsair fighter pilot in WWII and Korea. He died near El Centro when his plane didn’t pull out of a diving run. I learned of this from scuttlebutt when I was in my forties. What else was going on that seemed not to be important enough to share with the kids?
Was the
fault of silence their inheritance or was the fault mine? Maybe I was in a fog myself? The family
history began in a small town in northwest Poland named Goslaw. Our name first
appeared in Canada when immigrants from Poland must have changed their name to
the town of their origin to better fit in with their new world. Then our name popped up in upstate New York.
All of this history I dug up with searches on the internet, not from a shared primary
family history.
My father
was a young preacher boy who deferred from WWII to attend college to prepare
for an evangelical ministry. This must
have been a heavy and honorable decision but the humanness of such a decision was
never shared with his children, why not? Would
we not have been better equipped to make such significant decisions in our own
lives if we had a better understanding of the severity of decision making? How
does one make such large decisions?
There is a consequence to every decision.
If my parents were still living, I now have many questions to ask. Would I have the courage to ask, maybe? Simple stuff, mom and dad, how did you meet? What attracted you to each other, physical, mental or spiritual? I am guessing but my mother was a gifted musician and soloist who complemented the soon to be ministry of my father. Was this the basis of their relationship? While reorganizing the personal effects of my parents, I found a small box with school books and papers from a female personage of long ago. There must have been a very personal story in that box, why was it saved for sixty years? Mom when asked, would not answer. I trashed it without inspecting.
The most difficult question would be, what were my early years like? My memories are few with significant gaps. How do you remember those preschool years? Can you make sense of my snapshots?
- to be continued -
G. Goslaw
Landers, Ca.
