Post #91 – Women’s Memoirs, Book & Video Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Author Maureen Wlodarczyk’s memoir, Past-Forward: ….a three-decade and three-thousand mile journey home….
We’ve asked Maureen to share her story with you — a story right through her decision to write a memoir and the story structure she chose.
[Click on Book Image for Kindle Version, Print Version also Available. See Link Below.]
A Memoir Can Heal
Someone said that time heals all wounds. No, it doesn’t. Someone else said that love conquers all. No, it doesn’t. I once knew someone with a decades-old wound that had pierced her young heart and soul, and despite the love of a husband, children and grandchildren, that wound, locked deep inside her, remained ever tender. Her name was Kate and she was my beloved grandmother.
By the time I was a teenager, I had heard bits and pieces of the story of Kate’s unfortunate childhood. Born in 1904 to a poor and struggling first-generation Irish-American mother and father in Jersey City, she was one of five children. I’d learned that Kate’s mother, Mamie, contracted tuberculosis while caring for her older sister Annie. These two sisters lost their lives to TB and these twin deaths meant there were a total of nine motherless children. This was 1913 and Mamie was in her early thirties. Then just a year after losing her mother, Kate lost her younger sister when she burned to death in a fire. Her father, a stereotypical Irish drunk, parsed his children out to relatives and took off. Motherless at nine, fatherless soon after, Kate moved from Irish relative to Irish relative until she ran away at the age of thirteen. She eventually had to go before the court system and was placed as a live-in domestic servant. At age sixteen, she married my grandfather. She literally and figuratively turned her back on her Irish family and made a good life and happy marriage, creating a new family to replace the fractured one she had left behind.
Over a period of years, I got Kate to open up a bit and tell me more about her turbulent childhood. In truth, because of that turbulence and disruption, Kate didn’t know a whole lot about her Irish family. That’s when I hatched the idea that I could dilute Kate’s painful memories by going back beyond those awful childhood years to discover the ancestral family she never knew. Oh, the exuberance of a twenty-year-old! I gave Kate my promise (unsolicited) that I would find out “who she was.” I’m not sure Kate wanted me to go rattling skeletons in our family closet as she was a private person, but she didn’t try to stop me. Thus started my long and winding three-decade journey to find our Irish roots, a journey that would become my memoir, Past-Forward: ….a three-decade and three-thousand mile journey home….
None of my plans included writing a book and that played no part in my years of searching. In the 1970s and 80s, genealogical searching was daunting, especially when I had so little to go on and there was no Internet. Two steps forward, one (or two) back. One small discovery, two dead ends. I still remember insisting that Kate and my mother go with me to a local cemetery in search of Kate’s mother’s grave. (Kate had no idea where her mother was buried.) It was a dreary, drizzling day and they were wearing those elegant plastic rain bonnets that used to be so fashionable. The cemetery office confirmed that Kate’s mother was interred there. I was so proud to have found my great-grandmother’s grave . . . until we approached it and discovered it was unmarked – no headstone. Had I stuck my finger in that old wound? Someone said the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Yes, it is.
As life went on and I became a working wife and mother of two sons, I kept at the search as time allowed. In 1988, time ran out. My dear Kate was cruelly stolen from me by Alzheimer’s. When she died, she no longer knew who I was.
Using Technology to Research Family History and Your Memoir
Fortunately or not, I was born with the “relentless” gene and could not let go of the promise or the quest. I also have a strong intuitive sensibility that I let loose as I continued searching. I experienced a number of serendipitous coincidences where one little breakthrough or discovery led to another. Then came the Internet and the advent of online genealogical resources like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, and more. Technology and serendipity joined together and more and more doors were opening. Example? About six years ago while tooling around in Ancestry.com, I found a New Jersey Civil War military record for a man with the same name as Kate’s Irish-born grandfather (John J. Flannelly). Further digging confirmed he was Kate’s red-haired grandfather (my great-great-grandfather) and I was able to obtain a copy of his Union Army military record from the U.S. National Archives.
I Was Lucky to Find Serendipity in My Memoir Research
So, if that’s the technology aspect, where was the serendipity? Being a history addict, I had always been drawn to Colonial Williamsburg, initially visiting there with my husband in the late 1970s. That was the first of many visits over the next thirty years and, in the late 1990s, my older son graduated from the College of William and Mary. A review of Private John J. Flannelly’s Civil War military record revealed that, in May 1862, young John had fought in the Battle of Williamsburg and, immediately after, had been hospitalized for weeks in a Union field hospital in downtown Williamsburg. So, unbeknownst to us for decades, John Flannelly’s feet and mine and those of my sons, his great-great-great-grandsons, had walked the very same street (now known as Duke of Gloucester Street). I sometimes say he was “calling me” there.
In recent years, I was finally able to stitch together a bit ragged but cohesive story of Kate’s Irish ancestral family and eventually succeeded in connecting back to the time of her great-grandparents’ flight from County Sligo, Ireland, with their six surviving children during the catastrophic famine of the 1840s. I wept bitter and happy tears the day I received confirmation from Ireland that the 1832 marriage record for Kate’s great-grandparents had been found. Happy tears to finally know our family story and bitter tears that I could not sit down with Kate over a cup of tea and tell her who she was.
I wanted to document the story of our Irish roots so that family members and, hopefully, future generations, and especially my sons, would know and understand the courage and sacrifices of those who made our lives possible. After multiple false starts, I just couldn’t get it right. That’s when it came to me. I should tell the story as I always wanted to – by telling it to Kate. I started with two words: “Dear Kate.”
Writing My Memoir
Once I decided to write it as a letter to her, telling her both the story of my years of searching and the amazing discoveries I made, it just flowed forth, a tale spanning nearly 150 years from the remote rocky fields of the West of Ireland, across the Atlantic in the belly of a packet ship and then on to the tough Irish immigrant neighborhood in Jersey City where Kate would be born. I read it and re-read it and read it again trying to be sure I could hear myself talking to my grandmother as if I were holding her hands while telling her the story with wide eyes and great excitement. That’s when I knew I wanted to publish the story . . . and so I did. In September 2009, some thirty years after Kate, my mother and I stood in the rain looking down at my great-grandmother’s unmarked grave, I once again stood there. This time, the sun was shining down on a newly-installed gravestone.
There’s something to be said for being relentless.
