Telling the stories
27/07/15 04:36
Back in the days before we all carried digital voice recorders in our phones, before people carried phones with them, before phones existed at all, before tape recorders and other mechanical devices, court reporters used shorthand to make accurate records of legal proceedings. Roy was a court reporter. He learned to listen carefully and record accurately and quickly the proceedings of the court in the years before Montana had obtained statehood. His assignment was the territorial capitol and he would sit with the judge as the court heard the claims and counter claims of miners and cattlemen and tried a few criminals, including rustlers and gunslingers.
Our family has quite a few stories about Roy, but even more about his wife, who was a member of W.C.T.U. and quite outspoken in her political opinions. One of the reasons that we don’t tell too many stories is that Roy came from a long line of keepers of journals and he recorded much of his life in pen and ink. His journals have everything from the temperature and other weather observations to transcripts of sermons that he heard at church.
Their daughter married a lawyer and became mother to five daughters of her own. One of those daughters suffered from heart disease and died as a teen. The other four all married and had children and had a wide variety of adventures from serving as head of office for a US Senator to flying small planes over the Rocky Mountains to sailing to serving as a farm educator in India and several South American countries. One bicycled in Sri Lanka, another rote an elephant. They were all adventurers.
The collection of stories is pretty long at this point. Not all of the daughters were journal keepers, but they all were pretty good letter writers.
By the time we got to the next generation - the children of the four granddaughters of the court reporter - we are a diverse bunch. There’s a railroad man, a lawyer, a nurse’s assistant, a fireman, an organic farmer, a paper mill electrician, a musician, a long distance cyclist, a couple of boat builders, and a dozen other professions, including a preacher.
Despite having pretty good records, our family certainly has a wide diversity of stories about our ancestors. I was always pumping my aunts for stories of ministers and preachers who were in our family or close to it. A pioneer Methodist Circuit Rider, Brother Van, was a close family friend. The court reporter was executor of his will and recorder of some of his story. There have been two books published about Brother Van and there are still a lot of stories about him floating around Montana. Brother Van believed that every town in the state would one day have a Methodist Church and that each church would have a pastor and when the pastor was found the church would thrive. He believed in that so much that he would often purchase land for a parsonage as soon as a church was founded - long before it had become large enough to support a pastor. As a result he ended up owning house lots in several of the state’s smallest towns.
Brother Van was, by all accounts, an engaging preacher. He could go into almost any venue and start holding services and the crowd would continue to get bigger and bigger until he had filled the hall with people who had traveled for miles to hear him preach.
My career hasn’t come close to that of Brother Van. Of course, the times are different, but I have never started a new church were there was none. I have never preached in a saloon. I have never gone from town to town on horseback in the middle of the winter. And I don’t have congregants using short hand to record my sermons so they can remember what I said at a later time. I never actually aspired to be like Brother Van in the first place.
But I did somehow inherit my great grandfather’s penchant for keeping a journal. I don’t fill up file cabinets with hand-written documents, but I do write an essay every day and I’m approaching nine years of not missing a single day. Like my ancestor, I think that much of what I have written will not be remembered - or even read a few generations from now, but I do have a few faithful readers who enjoy reading what I have to say.
Like those who have gone before me, I don’t write primarily because I desire readers. I write because language is a tool that I know how to use and I use that tool to reflect and process the experiences and ideas that come from living in the brief moment of history that I have been given. Who knows, I may even one day record a story that someone else will deem worthy of retelling.
And like the court reporter journalist of my heritage, I have been privileged to know some pretty remarkable people and I’ve had the joy of writing part of their stories as a portion of the words that I’ve managed to place in this blog.
Somehow time has passed so that there are no members of the generation of my parents left in our family. My first cousins, siblings and I are the elders of our clan these days. Most of us are grandparents and some are great grandparents. Future generations are taking their place in the family story and soon they will be the keepers of the stories of our elders - and our stories as well.
I’m well aware that my time of writing will not go on forever, but while it lasts, I do gain great meaning and a sense of purpose by beginning each day with writing. Once in a while I even come back and re-read the words that I have written. Sometimes, I even search for an old blog post so that I can share it with someone else.
We are the keepers of the stories and stories can only be kept if they are told. If we were to remain silent (or if I were to not write) the stories could easily be lost.
The words will keep coming.
Our family has quite a few stories about Roy, but even more about his wife, who was a member of W.C.T.U. and quite outspoken in her political opinions. One of the reasons that we don’t tell too many stories is that Roy came from a long line of keepers of journals and he recorded much of his life in pen and ink. His journals have everything from the temperature and other weather observations to transcripts of sermons that he heard at church.
Their daughter married a lawyer and became mother to five daughters of her own. One of those daughters suffered from heart disease and died as a teen. The other four all married and had children and had a wide variety of adventures from serving as head of office for a US Senator to flying small planes over the Rocky Mountains to sailing to serving as a farm educator in India and several South American countries. One bicycled in Sri Lanka, another rote an elephant. They were all adventurers.
The collection of stories is pretty long at this point. Not all of the daughters were journal keepers, but they all were pretty good letter writers.
By the time we got to the next generation - the children of the four granddaughters of the court reporter - we are a diverse bunch. There’s a railroad man, a lawyer, a nurse’s assistant, a fireman, an organic farmer, a paper mill electrician, a musician, a long distance cyclist, a couple of boat builders, and a dozen other professions, including a preacher.
Despite having pretty good records, our family certainly has a wide diversity of stories about our ancestors. I was always pumping my aunts for stories of ministers and preachers who were in our family or close to it. A pioneer Methodist Circuit Rider, Brother Van, was a close family friend. The court reporter was executor of his will and recorder of some of his story. There have been two books published about Brother Van and there are still a lot of stories about him floating around Montana. Brother Van believed that every town in the state would one day have a Methodist Church and that each church would have a pastor and when the pastor was found the church would thrive. He believed in that so much that he would often purchase land for a parsonage as soon as a church was founded - long before it had become large enough to support a pastor. As a result he ended up owning house lots in several of the state’s smallest towns.
Brother Van was, by all accounts, an engaging preacher. He could go into almost any venue and start holding services and the crowd would continue to get bigger and bigger until he had filled the hall with people who had traveled for miles to hear him preach.
My career hasn’t come close to that of Brother Van. Of course, the times are different, but I have never started a new church were there was none. I have never preached in a saloon. I have never gone from town to town on horseback in the middle of the winter. And I don’t have congregants using short hand to record my sermons so they can remember what I said at a later time. I never actually aspired to be like Brother Van in the first place.
But I did somehow inherit my great grandfather’s penchant for keeping a journal. I don’t fill up file cabinets with hand-written documents, but I do write an essay every day and I’m approaching nine years of not missing a single day. Like my ancestor, I think that much of what I have written will not be remembered - or even read a few generations from now, but I do have a few faithful readers who enjoy reading what I have to say.
Like those who have gone before me, I don’t write primarily because I desire readers. I write because language is a tool that I know how to use and I use that tool to reflect and process the experiences and ideas that come from living in the brief moment of history that I have been given. Who knows, I may even one day record a story that someone else will deem worthy of retelling.
And like the court reporter journalist of my heritage, I have been privileged to know some pretty remarkable people and I’ve had the joy of writing part of their stories as a portion of the words that I’ve managed to place in this blog.
Somehow time has passed so that there are no members of the generation of my parents left in our family. My first cousins, siblings and I are the elders of our clan these days. Most of us are grandparents and some are great grandparents. Future generations are taking their place in the family story and soon they will be the keepers of the stories of our elders - and our stories as well.
I’m well aware that my time of writing will not go on forever, but while it lasts, I do gain great meaning and a sense of purpose by beginning each day with writing. Once in a while I even come back and re-read the words that I have written. Sometimes, I even search for an old blog post so that I can share it with someone else.
We are the keepers of the stories and stories can only be kept if they are told. If we were to remain silent (or if I were to not write) the stories could easily be lost.
The words will keep coming.