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https://ift.tt/2pU6DauSo on Sunday, before I drove back across the entire state, my family went and attended the church where my mother was baptized, and where my grandmother was baptized, because at the post-service coffee hour they were going to do a dedication of a little gallery in my late grandmother’s name, in recognition of the decades of work she did in compiling the history of the church.
I hadn’t realized this. I mean, I knew Grandma was a great researcher– just as much as my mother, who is renowned, Grandma was a master at indexing and transcribing primary source material, and collating all of it. She is most known for her work for the Shaker Heritage Society, and her handwriting is all through the archives of both the NY State Museum and the Rensselaer County Historical Society. But her first starting place was the Niskayuna Reformed Church, and I hadn’t known that.
She worked, full-time, her whole adult life, and so the history was one of several hobbies, for her. She dedicated two full days a year to it– most importantly and faithfully, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, she had off annually, and would spend in the NY State Archives, which were open that day. Every year, without fail, she would spend that day in the archives tracking down primary sources to support things she’d been researching.
And so in 1960, when she had two little children, when her husband was still alive, she published a little book, that was as complete a history as she could assemble of the church, which had been founded in 1750. She had collected every photograph she could find, she had census records, she had transcribed every baptism, she had rescued every box of fragile ancient papers from various closets and lofts and basements throughout the property (and the houses of some members)– and, as a native born into that congregation, she had accurately corrected typos and cleared up mistakes in genealogies, because she absolutely knew every family and who was an uncle and who was really a great-uncle and so on and so forth.
In 2000, she came back and updated the work, adding in the next 40 years of records but also adding in more primary source references where she could. She continued to update the archives throughout her life. She’d moved away from Niskayuna, a while after her husband died (not young, but they weren’t yet 60 and their children hadn’t yet graduated from university)– across the river, to Troy, but she still came back almost every Sunday to attend services and kept up her work on the archives, a bit.
She passed away in 2010, and was buried in the church yard there with her husband and son, who predeceased her by about a year.
About three years ago, they were reorganizing some storage space within the church, during some addition-building in the “education center” annex (the church building itself is on the National Historic Register, so there’s a separate building for the church supper type functions and the sunday school and all; my grandmother had a big say in opposing the people who wanted to just clobber an addition onto the side of the historic building, and was of the party that prevailed in making the building be separate), and someone found a “bunch of boxes of old papers and stuff, can’t we throw these out? do we need these?” and some people who’d known Grandma came dashing to the rescue, realized they needed a committee, and commandeered a suite of closets in the new building, which is now a series of filing cabinets with a huge index. They’ve just kept Grandma’s filing system, and added to it, but the framework was there. They expected to have a lot of work to do in organizing all these random boxes, but discovered immediately upon forming a committee and starting a work party that… no, the boxes were all immaculately organized, and there were indices of the transcriptions of the originals on acid-free archival paper from Grandma’s typewriter, and really they had almost nothing to do at all except to file them in the order Grandma had indicated.
So anyway, there’s now a gallery in the hallway between a couple of the meeting rooms, featuring a photograph of my grandmother, and then a series of photographs of the church that she had catalogued, starting with several 19th-century images of the parsonage and the brick church itself, and showing a succession of late 19th to early 20th century renovations of the interior, with the last being in the 1930s.
So it was lovely to see that, and her name is painted on the wall in nice big type.
But the real highlight of the event, for my mother, was when a childhood neighbor came up to her with a slim envelope and said, “I found these old photos in my basement, do you want them?” and Mom pulled out the handful of images, and there was her uncle as a baby in 1915, with blonde ringlets and a dress, and there was her mother as a baby in 1919 held in her mother Mabel’s arms, and there was a photo of Mabel as a young married woman, and there was a photo of Mabel as a girl with a lovely young woman, probably her mother, and my mother gasped out loud, turned the photo over to look at the back. “Mabel And Aunt Tina”, it said, in spidery pencil writing.
“That’s Christina Zeh,” my mother said, breathless. “My great-grandmother! I grew up with her but I have never seen a photo of her as a young woman!”
There were two, in the pile. I remember being told of Christina, my mom is named for her, and she lived next door when Mom was a little kid; she’d had polio in her youth and suffered from complications of it all her life, but lived to be 94. The photos I’ve seen of her feature her as a very slender, stooped, extremely old woman in a flowered housecoat.
But here she is. Mabel was born in 1889 and I believe she married in 1912, so I’m not sure of the actual date of this photo but it’s got to be sometime in the first decade of the 1900s. Check out Mabel’s sailor suit.
So– anyway, Mom drags out her recollection of Christina whenever someone asks her about vaccines, but also– her mother’s first cousin, whose name I forget, who was exactly Grandma’s age and played with her always, died at 4 of diphtheria, and I feel like that’s probably an even better example.
Grandma mourned her for her entire life. Consider that. They were born in 1919, the cousin died in 1922, and Grandma made it to 2010. That’s a potential 88 years that diphtheria stole from that little girl.
Vaccinate your fucking kids.
And it sort of hammered home, for me, the point of studying history– people think of The Olden Days as some long-forgotten, bygone era irrelevant to the current situation, but it’s all connected. I knew Mabel, she died at 97, when I was in elementary school. Polio didn’t kill Christina, so she survived to raise Mabel. Mabel’s daughter was spared diptheria, so she survived to marry and have my mother. My mother was vaccinated and never in any danger from either disease, and so here I am.
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