Dying Branches and Family Trees

I can’t help myself—I have to write about this family I’ve been researching, even though I wrote about them just yesterday. They deserve a memorial, because this branch might be dying out. Here’s the story.

John and Barbara grew up a few streets apart in a suburb of Manchester, England. They were the same age and both sets of parents worked in the cloth manufacturing industry at the very dawn of the industrial age. Probably the parents had started as cottage weavers, but with the invention of steam power and things being mechanized as fast as inventors could figure out a way to do it, they moved into town and began to specialize. John and Barbara had a little schooling and by their mid-teens were working alongside their parents.

Money was probably pretty scarce for the families. John and Barbara were not able to marry until they were 23 years old, and within a few months they spent their hard-earned money to buy emigrants’ passage to New York. Their eldest son was born a few months after they had arrived and had gotten work in a cotton and woolen mill near Philadelphia. Barbara was busy with babies every two years for ten years, and John got work in various mills, moving the family within Pennsylvania, to Massachusetts, back to Pennsylvania, to Maryland, and finally to New Jersey. The boy born in Massachusetts had died when he was about ten months old, so they had four children. The Civil War came along, and John served as a First Lieutenant in the New Jersey 1st Cavalry Volunteers, Company D. Before the war was over, the last daughter was born, six years after her next older brother.

John decided they must try the West, and he made his way across the country with a wagon train, ending up in Oregon. There he founded a woolen mill in Brownsville, and Barbara and the five children, and several friends who wanted to work in the mill, prepared to join him there. They sailed from New Jersey to Panama, crossed the Isthmus on mule back, and sailed up to Coos Bay, stopping at San Francisco on the way. Sadly, Barbara contracted malaria in Panama and died a few weeks after getting the children safely to their father in Brownsville, Oregon. She was only 38. John lost heart and left the mill. He moved the children to that little town on the Columbia River where eventually his three remaining sons would be buried. He became the town’s photographer. He lived only nine more years, dying when he was only 48.

His eldest son, William, never married. He is the one I talked about yesterday, who worked as a laborer until his death when he was 67.

The next son, Benjamin, had that very odd marriage to Felicia who left him after 31 years and married someone else (I found the second husband after writing about them). Ben and Felicia had two sons, Ralph and Paul. Paul died at the age of four. Ben died at the age of 75. His son Ralph died at the age of 58, leaving two sons. Ralph’s sons, Don and John, died at the ages of 50 and 54, respectively. Wow. Did these men have short-lived genes or what? I don’t know whether Don and John had children. I think at least one of them did, because in the hazy part of my memory when we used to visit Ralph’s widow once a year (our yearly trip across the Golden Gate Bridge!), I think I remember meeting her two grandchildren once, children about my age or a little older.

The next sibling was Sarah, who married Clark and had two daughters and then a son. The second daughter, Beatrice, died at the age of five. The eldest daughter, Claudia, became a music teacher and never married or had children. The son, Clint, was epileptic and cared for his widowed mother until she died at the age of 74. Clint died soon after their mother, when he was 45. He had not married nor had children. Claudia died when she was 79.

After Sarah came Joseph. He’s the one who married for the first time when he was 56, to a woman who was about 50, and they didn’t have children together. He died when he was 81 years old.

Finally there was Laura. She married Ferdinand, and they had two daughters, Beatrice and Ruth. The elder married when she was in her mid-thirties; the younger never married. Beatrice had one son and died when she was 49. Laura died ten years later, when she was nearly 83. Ruth was a nurse and lived to be 83. Beatrice’s son had six children. I’m one of them.

If Ben’s grandsons, Don and Ralph, had children, then they and we are the last of this family. There are probably only eight of us in my generation, and from six of us there are only four more in the next generation. A shrinking branch!

In summary, John and Barbara had six children, seven grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, eight great-great grandchildren, and four great-great-great grandchildren. The trend doesn’t seem to be toward growth in the family tree. Where are all the branches? This tree seems to be growing like a bumpy shrub or something. Maybe the next generation will have only two in it, full circle back to John and Barbara’s generation. And then the tree will disappear. Is that sad?

Naaaaah.

Speaking of dying trees, or not, you should see two of my trees in the front yard. A couple years ago, our next door neighbors left and the man who owned the house came and sprayed the weeds from time to time that summer. He used this powerful herbicide that is supposed to keep anything from growing for years. The wind blows all the time here, and that stuff blew over the little fence and through the west half of the Macintosh apple tree. It hit the new little honey locust tree that our daughter and granddaughter gave my husband for his birthday. By the end of the summer, the two trees looked pretty darned sick. A year ago in the spring, the honey locust looked dead, and the apple tree was having a very hard time of it. It put out sick-looking little leaves that withered but somehow didn’t quite die until winter. We cut off the honey locust and trained up one of the suckers out of the roots to make a new tree. It's skinny, but it's doing well. This spring only half the apple tree leafed out, and those leaves look sick. A local expert told my neighbor to tell us to cut out all the dead stuff and not give up hope. This week we cut out all the dead stuff, and now we have a half a Macintosh apple tree. It looks terrible! We’re hoping to train some suckers to become branches out the west side of the tree. I decided I’d better put fertilizer on it every week—talk to it encouragingly every morning after my walk—you know, whatever I can think of to give it every chance to recover.

Like we did with the apple tree and the honey locust when it looked like they were dead, when your family is severely stressed, you sometimes do something radical and you always pray. If your family is dying out, it might not matter at all. The thing is, families are eternal and so it doesn’t matter whether a tree branch here or there stops growing: you have a responsibility to do everything you can to keep your section healthy while it’s here and then pray that it will reach its full potential in the hereafter.

I’m pretty sure that John and Barbara are proud of the lot of us.